RaveMaudlin House... brilliant ... Tawada renders with beautiful immediacy the selfless and heartwarming effort of someone learning an entirely new language, just to talk to you. She also shows us the difference between intelligence and fluency–we see many examples of rich narration followed by broken attempts at speech, as well as the opposite ... This is a rare book where the translation not only conveys the narrative, but constructs a metanarrative as well. Mitsutani’s sparkling prose adds a new and different focus to the book’s multilingualism. The translation invites its new English-speaking audience to consider both the global community forged by the English language, and the violence by which it propagated ... Tawada’s sensitivities to the loss of language–and her knack for its transmutation–may be rooted in personal experience. She has been a Japanese expat in Germany for forty years, and has won numerous awards for her writing in both languages. At the center of her work are words, worlds, and the borders they straddle–in her writing we see the closeness of hearts, and the fallibility of the barriers between them.
