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Spontaneous Acts
- Author
- Yoko Tawada
- Narrator
- Sebastian Humphreys
- Publisher
- John Murray Press
- Publish Date
- 11 July 2024
- Run Time
- 3 hours 40 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Patrik is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, 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 get past the first question on the registration form: 'What is your nationality?'
As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . .
Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music - of seeing and being seen - is examined and celebrated.
Spontaneous Acts reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.
Previous praise for Tawada:
'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes
'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
Critics Review
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Tawada is an artist out on the tip of the spear. She isn't courting a readership, curating her image, coaxing popularity like some; she is pushing her art forward, and we as readers are welcome along for the ride if we can keep up. It's startling, breathtaking prose, literature at its purest. What to compare it to? Nothing. It is simply Tawadaesque...
The Japan Times
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This slim novel is a beautiful reflection on nationality, friendship and the value of art.
Dazed
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A poignant ode to artistic inspiration... Inventive and deeply human.
Publishers Weekly
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Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. . . . She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds.
The New Yorker
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Tawada disrupts our perception and reveals the terror and beauty of our world as we get lost in it, and regain our footing through reading her novels.
Kit Fan, author of THE INK CLOUD READER
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Tawada is a master of defamiliarization and ultimately of the unity that can arise from the discord of human consciousness. I read Spontaneous Acts in a state of fascination and wonder.
Elizabeth McKenzie, author of THE DOG OF THE NORTH
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A love letter to language and to connection . . . Tawada effortlessly unfurls flesh and blood into a world of intricacies and untethered thoughts.
The Conversation
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A keen observer of cultural and linguistic dislocation, Tawada has absorbed a kind of anti-language from Celan, a deeply affecting, sui generis diction unmoored from nationality or obvious tradition.
New Left Review
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The varied characters in Tawada's work―from different countries, of different sexes and species―are united by the quality that Walter Benjamin describes as "crepuscular": "None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines."
The New York Times Magazine
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Reads almost like a cautionary tale . . . this is what happens if you devote your life to poetry. Celan's poems are Patrik's only confidants . . . This is Tawada's pandemic novel, which is never addressed directly―but it explains why so many buildings are closed, and why Patrik's desire for connection has a hysterical, unresolved urgency.
Harper's
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Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible.
The New York Review of Books
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Yoko Tawada
- Narrator
- Sebastian Humphreys
- Duration
- 3 hours 40 minutes
- Release Date
- 11 July 2024
- ISBN
- 9780349704258
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- John Murray Press
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Metaphysical / philosophical fiction
Synopsis
The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada.Patrik is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, 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 get past the first question on the registration form: 'What is your nationality?'As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . .Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music - of seeing and being seen - is examined and celebrated.Spontaneous Acts reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.Previous praise for Tawada:'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
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