Spontaneous Acts, Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada’s highly anticipated, Spontaneous Acts, is an immersive and mesmerising expression of friendship, language, conversation, music and most importantly, of seeing and being seen. The experience of reading Spontaneous Acts feels like a heady dream that continually blurs the lines between the boundaries of truth and fiction and memory and reality.
Critically acclaimed author, Yoko Tawada, centres her enigmatic novel around Patrik, a literary researcher who is attempting to acclimatise to his city, Berlin, coming back to life after lockdown. At the point at which we meet Patrik, he finds it challenging to leave his house, and the smallest of decisions overwhelm him; however, the chink of light in Patrik’s life is his passion – or perhaps obsession – with opera and the poetry of Paul Celan, whose work has greatly informed Tawaka’s thoughts on the complexities of language.
An inventive, intelligent and occasionally demanding read, Spontaneous Acts resists any singular, definite interpretations, and is sure to stretch your imagination to its limit, leaving you feeling gratifyingly bewildered and ready to delve into her kaleidoscopic world all over again.
Editorial Picks
