It’s almost a Celan smoothie: icy, sweet, and, of course, foamy, a little treat from the tart fruits of the poet’s labor. You could walk around the mall with it. It coats your tongue, numbs your hand, and soon you have to pee, and it’s all very nice, and then it’s over. Tawada has smuggled tons of Celan references into it.
Allows Tawada a fresh opportunity for linguistic play—the wit that distinguishes all her work—as well as insights that aren’t solely playful ... The genius of Yoko Tawada is to dramatize how speaking in tongues, tearing language from its roots, may offer the best option for humanity under ever-worsening threat.
Not a plot-driven novel ... Tawada aptly captures the sense of everlasting monotony of life under lockdown conditions ... Takes up language itself as a major motif. Characteristically, Tawada plays with the German in which her novel is written ... It takes only a passing knowledge of poetry and the world of academia, though, to understand Patrik’s quietly ironic sense of humor—one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel.
Draws on the surrealist toolbox to sketch a solipsistic, obsessive mind haunted by Celan’s turns of phrase, floating through the ghostly streets of Berlin ... aying tribute to her chosen literary ancestors even as she swerves away from them, Tawada’s music-prose is a testament to the spirit of collaboration: to the miracle of being able to test, with and against another consciousness, how far a language might pass from one private recess to another.
Most impressive to me is how deftly Tawada establishes the antitheses, scope of concerns, and voice of this 1st/3rd person and his jittery world, all of which has the symmetry and clarity of realism. Susan Bernofsky’s acutely attuned translation delivers these qualities.
Patrik’s perspective is mirrored in Bernofsky’s translation, with its perfectly balanced tone of dry humor and tenderness ... Ultimately, whether the story is a fever song or an afterlife dream feels irrelevant. It is Patrik’s performance of his story that makes this brilliant book unique.
Celan suffuses Tawada’s novel like a vapour, his language, experiences and eventual suicide warping its gravity like a superdense star ... Celan’s refusal of answers urges the reader toward better questions, the kind that light a path through the text’s darkness. Tawada’s novel lifts this, too, from the great poet, the atmosphere of mysterious meaning in which one wanders, sometimes lost but for the illumination provided by leaps of chance understanding, references dimly apprehended, jokes overheard, problems rued and poetry exalted.
