#RivetingReviews: Rosie Goldsmith reviews SPONTANEOUS ACTS by Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada is one of the most inventive and thrilling voices in literature today. She writes experimental and imaginative novels, short stories, poems, plays and essays that touch on current concerns, and question the very basis of our human existence and communication.

Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960. Her father was a translator and bookseller. She moved to Hamburg in 1982, and Berlin in 2006, where she now lives. She writes in both Japanese and German and has published several books in both languages and received numerous major prizes in both countries.

Her career as a writer began in 1987 when she published a collection of poems released in a bilingual edition entitled Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts – Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (English equivalent: Nothing Only Where You Are). Tawada took a bilingual approach again in her 2004 novel Das nackte Auge, writing first in German, then in Japanese, and producing two separate texts, later translated as The Naked Eye. She is widely published in English, including her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well other novels The Bridegroom Was a Dog, The Emissary, and her breakthrough success in English, the spectacular Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016). Her latest novel is Spontaneous Acts (2024) in an outstanding translation by one of her regular translators from German, Susan Bernofsky. Susan’s Afterword is essential reading for any translator and lover of Tawada’s fiction.

Written at the height of the pandemic in Berlin, this novel has a locked-in feel, also because its subject is the inside of the protagonist Patrik’s mind, which he admits is, a mind full of thought-foam. The outside world overwhelms him, he can hardly get out of bed or venture out of his flat. We never know if he really does or doesn’t. People say I am sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.

Even though the “condition” of “the patient” is not named it is clear that Patrik/the patient inhabits a world of reality, dreams, delusions and imagination. His visits (if they do take place) to his therapist are useless to him because his desire to speak withers on the vine. His affliction is to be occupied, overrun by letters that were tin soldiers firing hard figures at him.

Why, you might ask, read a novel that is so strange, where so little happens and we’re not sure if anything is real or imaginary? Because Tawada’s ideas and writing are electrifying. Her own experience of crossing borders, cultures and languages is integral to every word she writes, sometimes even invents.

This is an intensely literary novel, replete with references to Gottfried Benn, Pushkin, Nelly Sachs, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann and chiefly to Paul Celan, the German-speaking Jewish poet born in a part of Romania that’s now in Ukraine), who lived and died in Paris and who hovers like a ghost over the novel. Patrik/the patient is an academic, a literary scholar, and as the world recovers from Covid, he is invited to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, Patrik’s obsession and Tawada’s inspiration for this novel. The US edition is actually entitled Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, a more accurate title than Spontaneous Acts. It is Celan that brings Patrik together with a Trans-Tibetan man named Leo-Eric Fu. Their friendship, conversation, music and a shared passion for the multi-lingual, fragmentary and often bleak poetry of Celan provide uplifting moments of escape for Patrik – and the reader! One feature of Tawada’s writing often overlooked is her humour and wit:

A new friendship is my new form of long-distance travel. The airline is called Leo-Eric Fu and can fly much faster than any Lufthansa stork or the Indonesian divinity Garuda. Leo-Eric Fu, the grandson of a physician who practiced Chinese medicine in Paris and read Celan. His role: friend. His voice: tenor. His personal pronoun: you. Patrik falters; he can’t remember if he’s been using the informal du to address Leo-Eric instead of the formal Sie. No matter. Tomorrow, or the day after, his friend will become a du-you. Then the patient will stop feeling like a patient. His name: Patrik. His voice: baritone. He feels reborn. What has this marvellous Trans-Tibetan man done with Patrik? Nothing more than ask him questions, give him gifts, lend his thoughts wings.

Everything about Patrik’s life is fragile, unstable; his desire is to connect, make sense of his internal life. But even his national identity is unsure: his parents emigrated from Ukraine (he is, though, overjoyed to share this Ukrainian connection with Celan) and Patrik was born in Germany, but, as he muses:

The police have started to record parental countries of origin on a blacklist. A person being German no longer suffices, in their view, to demonstrate the cleanliness of his underwear.

Across 131 packed and pacy pages we have witty and astute musings and meditations on identity, migration, xenophobia (his brother is a far right activist in Berlin), on individual words and even consonants, on Vienna, Berlin, on opera, poetry, war, memory and therapy. I often found myself writing down whole sentences, delighting in the wordplay and appreciating her wisdom.

Spontaneous Acts is not an easy novel, there is no clear conclusion or happy ending, but its rewards (if that’s how you judge a good novel) are infinite. It’s also perhaps helpful to embrace it as a ‘pandemic novel’ , of which there are now quite a few, perhaps even forming a genre of their own. Patrik’s loneliness, isolation and disorientation reflect the silence and otherworldliness we all encountered in that time.

Reviewed by Rosie Goldsmith

SPONTANEOUS ACTS

Written by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

Published by Dialogue Books (2024)

December 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Rosie Goldsmith is Director and Founder of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter. She was a BBC broadcaster for twenty years and is today an arts journalist and presenter. She was chair of the judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2018–2020.

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