Spontaneous Acts

(Paperback)

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The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada.

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. 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" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . .

Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us.

Previous praise for Tawada:

'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes

'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Author Bio

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books-stories, novels, poems, plays, essays-in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal and the National Book Award.