Book of the Week: PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL* by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself ‘the patient’, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…

In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.

* The New Directions title is Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , the Dialogue Books edition is titled Spontaneous Acts (same book, different titles, different jackets… buy the one you prefer!)

VOLUME BooksBook of the week