Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

by Yoko Tawada, Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

Overview

A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award

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. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, “What have you done to your head? I don’t want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!” 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 new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811234887
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/09/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as “magnificently strange.”
For New Directions, Susan Bernofsky has translated Yoko Tawada’s Where Europe Begins, The Naked Eye, and Memoirs of a Polar Bear (winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation), eight titles by the great Swiss-German modernist Robert Walser, and five books by Jenny Erpenbeck, including The End of Days (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize). She is the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser, and teaches at Columbia University, where she also directs the literary translation program.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/03/2024

Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, delivers a poignant ode to artistic inspiration. Patrik, whom Tawada obliquely refers to as “the patient,” is a literary researcher in Berlin whose love of art and objects often precludes his love for other people (“Even as a child, he called his toy tractor ‘my colleague’ and addressed his teddy bear as ‘Professor’ ”). After the Covid-19 lockdown lifts, Patrik receives an invitation to speak at a conference on his hero, the poet Paul Celan, but he feels too overwhelmed to attend. At a café, he meets a mysterious man named Leo-Eric Fu, who knows his work and encourages him to reconsider. The men’s lively conversations give the novel its charge as they discuss their shared love of Celan’s ever-surprising word choices and experience the ease and thrill of a new connection, which opens Patrik’s world in surprising ways (“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”). Readers will fall in love with this inventive and deeply human story. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"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 - Dustin Illingworth

"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 - Julian Lucas

"Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible."

The New York Review of Books - Natasha Wimmer

"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 - Rivka Galchen

2024-05-17
Japanese novelist Tawada, who lives in Berlin, observes a scholar’s obsession with a poet.

When does an interest become an obsession? A pathology? For the central character of Tawada’s Covid-19-era novella, problems come to light after his interest becomes a job. Patrik—more often referred to as “the patient”—is a literature scholar in the midst of a mental breakdown. The object of Patrik’s work, and of his obsession, is the 20th-century Romania-born Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In his thoughts and conversations, Patrik references endless minutiae of the poet’s work, including his preoccupations with Zen and Kabbalah. For Patrik, Celan takes on a similar mystical significance—no detail small enough to escape notice, nothing in life too mundane to connect back to his work. Patrik aspires to “give a lecture in which he revealed the significance of every single letter Celan used in his poetry,” but he’s hobbled by his mental illness, which largely prevents him from leaving home. When he does, the patient suffers absurd compulsions, such as an inability to turn right at intersections or to order at a café. After a server offers a drink, he complains: “Why grapefruit juice? The grapefruit available in Berlin is mostly imported from Israel. Celan didn’t go to Israel until 1969.” Although he insists that “Patrik is different from the patient,” the line between them is undefined. The narrative embodies his alienation by fluctuating between first and third person and traversing fragmented timelines. What results is an inventive homage to modernist literature, wrapped up in an unexpectedly personal depiction of illness. Although the patient’s problems appear to be psychological, they manifest in his physicality: “I ought to leave my body to its own devices, it can lead a healthier life without me,” he says. “…I’ll stop trying to read my partial, physical pain. Instead, I’ll read Celan.”

A dark but charming portrait of a man unmoored by his love of an artist.

Kirkus Reviews