Spontaneous Acts

Patrik lives in Berlin as a literary researcher with an appetite for opera, the poetry of Paul Celan, and coffee that must be served with milk. While the city is just coming back to life after lockdown, Patrik finds it hard to get out of bed and enjoys watching livestreams of his favourite opera singers from the safety of his room. On the days he manages to leave his apartment, small decisions overwhelm him – whether to cross the road at a crosswalk or turn right or left, and what to say when a waitress asks for his drink order. On one such day, he meets Leo-Eric Fu, a mysterious man who already seems to know him and acts as if they have been friends for years. What unfolds is a rollicking, inventive, sometimes challenging novel that unfolds like a lucid dream. The lines between dream-state and wakefulness, truth and deception, and living and dying, are hard to discern. The resulting effect is almost like slipping into a new plane of reality.

Working in both Japanese and German, Yoko Tawada’s work often highlights the strangeness and complexities of language. This is a trait she shares with Paul Celan, one of the most important German-language poets of the post-World War II era, and one of Tawada’s greatest influences. As noted by Tawada’s translator, Susan Bernofsky, Celan is known for ‘estranging words from their inherited meanings, and thereby opening up new avenues of association and interpretation.’ We see this emulated in Spontaneous Acts, where Tawada’s slippery prose evades any single interpretation. Reading it feels like being invited to stretch the very limits of your imagination and upon finishing it, I felt like I had woken from a distorting stupor. I recommend it for readers who aren’t afraid of mystical, inconclusive novels that have you guessing all the way through.