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Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel
Die Hauptfigur ist ein junger Celan-Forscher in einer Lebenskrise. Patrik soll einen Vortrag auf einer Tagung in Paris halten, doch er hat Angst davor zu reisen. Er lebt in Berlin. Oft geht er in ein Café, liest dort. Eines Tages steht ein Mann vor seinem Tisch, der transtibetanisch auf ihn wirkt. Der Mann weiß beunruhigend viel über ihn. Eine Freundschaft entwickelt sich. Im Hintergrund lauert ein Rätsel. Der Großvater des chinesischen Freundes hat in Paris in den 1950er und 60er Jahren chinesische Medizin praktiziert. Mit seiner Hilfe kommt der Forscher auf neue Deutungsmöglichkeiten von Begriffen wie Meridian oder Fadensonnen. Und es geht um viel mehr. Ein vielschichtiger Roman über Freundschaft, Krankheit und Sprache und über Begegnungen, die einen Faden spinnen zwischen den Welten. (Auch die Einschränkungen der jüngsten Vergangenheit und die Gegenwart kommen unaufdringlich vor). Gedichte spielen eine Rolle in diesem kompakten Roman von Yoko Tawada, am Ende der Lektüre bleibt auch eine große Lust, Celan zu lesen. Paul Celan wäre am 23. November dieses Jahrs 100 geworden. Der Roman ist Buch der Woche im WDR5 (ab 15.11.2020): "In sich verschränkenden Sprach- und Traumbildern kommt in dieser vorzüglichen Erzählung nicht nur der Celan-Forscher Patrick, sondern auch der Leser der Dichtersprache Celans sehr nah … ein neuer Roman von Yoko Tawada, der auch die Geschichte eines fruchtbaren Austausches zwischen westlicher und fernöstlicher Kultur erzählt." (Terry Albrecht)
87 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2020
50 people are currently reading
1633 people want to read
About the author
Yōko Tawada
125 books1,032 followersYōko Tawada (多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German.
Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.
Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.
Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.
(from Wikipedia)
Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.
Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.
Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 133 reviews
July 20, 2024
For many years, Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan has been a source of fascination for Yoko Tawada. She’s written about Celan extensively but a request for a guest lecture on his work prompted her to reconsider fiction’s potential as a space through which to explore ideas about his poetry. There are obvious discontinuities but equally striking continuities between Tawada’s approach to writing and Celan’s. Like Tawada, Celan might be understood as working trans-culturally: raised in what was then Romania – now Ukraine – he adopted his “mother’s tongue” German for his poetry. Like Tawada, he was proficient in more than one language. Celan’s pieces are often rooted in his experiences of the Holocaust. Both his parents died in concentration camps, Celan himself survived incarceration in a Nazi labour camp. In his poetry he sought to reconfigure German, an attempt at a radical reclaiming of the language from its associations with fascism. Like Tawada, elements of his work, particularly his later writing, are opaque, linguistically complex, notoriously difficult to decipher.
Tawada’s novel centres on a former, low-level academic researcher. Patrik’s invested in interpreting Celan’s poetry. But an invitation to travel from his base in Berlin to Paris, to speak at a Celan conference has left him in crisis, tormented by indecision. Patrik finds himself unable to cope with a requirement to declare his nationality, to pin himself down to one identity defined by national borders. This identity crisis also manifests in Patrik’s everyday sense of self, he frequently refers to himself as ‘the patient’ a label that seems to stem from years in therapy, but actually symbolises much more than that. Patrik has lived through Covid lockdowns which have now been lifted but fragility, the sense of danger, the possibility of all-pervasive “sickness” lingers. A “sickness” that communicates something fundamentally problematic about nationalism and contemporary German society. It also harks back to Tawada’s long-standing explorations of the relations between self and body. Patrik can no longer distinguish between his thoughts, dreams and reality, a blurring of boundaries that echo aspects of anti-nationalist Celan’s life and work. Patrik’s profoundly isolated, caught up in transgressing the lines between the speaker and the spoken, between language, intent and expression.
But then Patrik has a chance encounter with Leo-Eri Fu, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination. To Patrik, Fu seems a ‘trans-Tibetan angel’ an otherworldly figure with an interest in Celan, something which enables Patrik to form a tentative bond. Fu’s character invokes angels found in Celan and the influence of Rilke’s secular angels – although here Fu more closely resembles characters in Wim Wender’s rescripting of Rilke. Through their fragmented conversations and Patrik’s solitary reflections, Tawada gradually constructs a critique of Celan’s poetry and its position within a wider German-language canon, particularly works by ‘othered’ authors – here predominantly Jewish writers and poets from Kafka to Nelly Sachs. “Othering” is a significant feature of the relationship between Patrik and Fu, raising the spectre of reductionist misinterpretations and European plundering of East Asian culture - countered here via Fu's characterisation.
“Othering” in Tawada’s narrative indirectly comments on Celan’s themes and significant preoccupations. Political exploitation of notions of the so-called ‘other’ is increasingly a concern in Patrik’s Germany, as Celan feared, fascism and racism are once again on the rise. Celan attempted to denazify German language, scattered throughout his poetry are border-crossing instances of linguistic resistance from his use of the archaic and neologistic to portmanteau words to the incorporation of terms from other languages. Highlighted in Tawada’s text through Patrik’s seemingly idiosyncratic linguistic choices, his stream of half-buried allusions to Celan’s work, his flirtation with Jewish mysticism. As with Celan, for Patrik reality’s fractured, meaning’s deferred, uncertain, always just out of reach. Even Patrik’s struggles with academia - the routine tearing down of arguments, exclusionary canonical hierarchies - hint at Celan’s experiences, his frustrations with what he considered “misreadings” of his poetry. Patrik finds solace in music, watching opera on DVD, performances which seem to offer a means of transcending borders and language barriers. Although even this is suspicious, since in Celan music’s often tied to the Jewish musicians forced to perform in concentration camps, providing a soundtrack to the murder and burial of their fellow prisoners.
Tawada’s narrative was originally published in 2020, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Celan’s death by suicide, and the 100th anniversary of his birth. Tawada’s readings were centred in events intended to commemorate his life and work - as an introduction to Celan her novel’s invaluable. It’s also an impressive reworking of Celan teasing out issues surfacing in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, around the time of the pandemic. For all these reasons it’s well worth reading. Yet as a novel it wasn’t entirely successful for me, it’s undoubtedly intelligent, frequently insightful, cleverly constructed. But I could trace the machinations and manipulations underlying its design all too easily. It often seemed more thinly-disguised dissertation than fully-formed narrative. I found the ending particularly problematic and incredibly contrived. Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
Published in the US under the title 'Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel'
Tawada’s novel centres on a former, low-level academic researcher. Patrik’s invested in interpreting Celan’s poetry. But an invitation to travel from his base in Berlin to Paris, to speak at a Celan conference has left him in crisis, tormented by indecision. Patrik finds himself unable to cope with a requirement to declare his nationality, to pin himself down to one identity defined by national borders. This identity crisis also manifests in Patrik’s everyday sense of self, he frequently refers to himself as ‘the patient’ a label that seems to stem from years in therapy, but actually symbolises much more than that. Patrik has lived through Covid lockdowns which have now been lifted but fragility, the sense of danger, the possibility of all-pervasive “sickness” lingers. A “sickness” that communicates something fundamentally problematic about nationalism and contemporary German society. It also harks back to Tawada’s long-standing explorations of the relations between self and body. Patrik can no longer distinguish between his thoughts, dreams and reality, a blurring of boundaries that echo aspects of anti-nationalist Celan’s life and work. Patrik’s profoundly isolated, caught up in transgressing the lines between the speaker and the spoken, between language, intent and expression.
But then Patrik has a chance encounter with Leo-Eri Fu, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination. To Patrik, Fu seems a ‘trans-Tibetan angel’ an otherworldly figure with an interest in Celan, something which enables Patrik to form a tentative bond. Fu’s character invokes angels found in Celan and the influence of Rilke’s secular angels – although here Fu more closely resembles characters in Wim Wender’s rescripting of Rilke. Through their fragmented conversations and Patrik’s solitary reflections, Tawada gradually constructs a critique of Celan’s poetry and its position within a wider German-language canon, particularly works by ‘othered’ authors – here predominantly Jewish writers and poets from Kafka to Nelly Sachs. “Othering” is a significant feature of the relationship between Patrik and Fu, raising the spectre of reductionist misinterpretations and European plundering of East Asian culture - countered here via Fu's characterisation.
“Othering” in Tawada’s narrative indirectly comments on Celan’s themes and significant preoccupations. Political exploitation of notions of the so-called ‘other’ is increasingly a concern in Patrik’s Germany, as Celan feared, fascism and racism are once again on the rise. Celan attempted to denazify German language, scattered throughout his poetry are border-crossing instances of linguistic resistance from his use of the archaic and neologistic to portmanteau words to the incorporation of terms from other languages. Highlighted in Tawada’s text through Patrik’s seemingly idiosyncratic linguistic choices, his stream of half-buried allusions to Celan’s work, his flirtation with Jewish mysticism. As with Celan, for Patrik reality’s fractured, meaning’s deferred, uncertain, always just out of reach. Even Patrik’s struggles with academia - the routine tearing down of arguments, exclusionary canonical hierarchies - hint at Celan’s experiences, his frustrations with what he considered “misreadings” of his poetry. Patrik finds solace in music, watching opera on DVD, performances which seem to offer a means of transcending borders and language barriers. Although even this is suspicious, since in Celan music’s often tied to the Jewish musicians forced to perform in concentration camps, providing a soundtrack to the murder and burial of their fellow prisoners.
Tawada’s narrative was originally published in 2020, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Celan’s death by suicide, and the 100th anniversary of his birth. Tawada’s readings were centred in events intended to commemorate his life and work - as an introduction to Celan her novel’s invaluable. It’s also an impressive reworking of Celan teasing out issues surfacing in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, around the time of the pandemic. For all these reasons it’s well worth reading. Yet as a novel it wasn’t entirely successful for me, it’s undoubtedly intelligent, frequently insightful, cleverly constructed. But I could trace the machinations and manipulations underlying its design all too easily. It often seemed more thinly-disguised dissertation than fully-formed narrative. I found the ending particularly problematic and incredibly contrived. Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.
Published in the US under the title 'Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel'
July 31, 2024
Paul Celan and the Tans-Tibetan Angel is a transcendent novel. Yoko Tawada is brilliant. She has quickly become one of my top three favorite authors. Her knowledge of language, construction of sentences, descriptions, comparisons, and word choice are unparalleled. I read the translator’s note at the end, and this took my understanding of her talent to a higher level. Tawada seamlessly uses words and phrases from Celan’s poems throughout her narrative. This is one I plan on rereading in the very near future. I may opt to buy the audio and listen to it to auditorily experience a book about language and singing.
The novel was written during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This is evident in the main character’s (a research assistant at a Language Institute and expert on Celan’s poetry) resistance to leave home, preference for social isolation, and reluctance to to fly to Paris. He is socially awkward in general, and this social awkwardness is compounded by the pandemic. He relies on several strategies to compartmentalize to navigate his day. I love books that involve numbers or mathematics, and this one doesn’t disappoint.
If you love words; their origins, meanings, connections to other languages, and other possible meanings, I strongly recommend reading Yoko Tawada’s work. Paul Celan and the Tans-Tibetan Angel is a transformative story with the sense of sadness woven throughout, but I did not feel sad or melancholic while reading it. The translator’s note gives insight into Celan’s life which I found to be sad and interesting. It also points out the subtle social commentary Tawada is known for. The novel reminds the reader of the power of poetry and friendship. It is a quick and worthwhile read.
The novel was written during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This is evident in the main character’s (a research assistant at a Language Institute and expert on Celan’s poetry) resistance to leave home, preference for social isolation, and reluctance to to fly to Paris. He is socially awkward in general, and this social awkwardness is compounded by the pandemic. He relies on several strategies to compartmentalize to navigate his day. I love books that involve numbers or mathematics, and this one doesn’t disappoint.
If you love words; their origins, meanings, connections to other languages, and other possible meanings, I strongly recommend reading Yoko Tawada’s work. Paul Celan and the Tans-Tibetan Angel is a transformative story with the sense of sadness woven throughout, but I did not feel sad or melancholic while reading it. The translator’s note gives insight into Celan’s life which I found to be sad and interesting. It also points out the subtle social commentary Tawada is known for. The novel reminds the reader of the power of poetry and friendship. It is a quick and worthwhile read.
Read
March 19, 2025Two Forms of Imagination: Dense and Diffuse
-
This is a diffusely imagined poetic meditation on Celan, set as a series of conversations between "the patient" (a person contemplating presenting a paper at a conference on Paul Celan) and a "trans-Tibetan" man who unexpectedly and unaccountably joins him in cafes to talk about Celan.
For me, Celan is a model of dense imagination. His later poems, like the collection Fadensonnen (translated here as Threadsuns), are models of vocabulary- and image-building on a microscale: each poem invents its own words, syntax, and imagery. The poems are both tight and enigmatic. They appear as finely crafted as German morphemes will permit, and at the same time open to unusually wide ranges of meaning, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean Bollack, John Felstiner and others have shown.
Yoko Tawada has a diffuse imagination. Her writing depends on a sort of free association, for example here, as the two acquaintances move from one topic to another:
"The woman walking in front of the patient casts a long shadow from which a bat suddenly flies up, vanishing behind a rain gutter. Anyone who casts a shadow is human. The patient feels like a bat that couldn't manage to escape and now remains shackled to a laboratory table. The backs of its wings must be thoroughly investigated. The operating lamp is an enormous showerhead with five blinding eyes. The bat is yanked from the dark and subjected to cruel luminescence. It's said that songbirds generally bleed very little. A bat is a winged songmouse. Its song is an acquired taste possibly necessitating an acquired immunity..."
This passage continues for a page or two. It's aimless in the sense that it relies on juxtapositions between adjacent thoughts to generate expressive meaning. The skips and feints from bats to medicine, German words to Celan's neologisms, singing to illness, biology to voyeurism (the narrator is following an opera singer), all create a loosely associative frame of mind. It's a genial surrealism. For me, this is a universe away from Celan's taut, fastidious, compressed way of writing, and the text registers no awareness of that gulf.
In a handful of passages these informal trains of associative thought come together, and suddenly it's possible to imagine a real reading of Celan:
"The patient can't get the verb koepfeln (to dive headfirst) out of his head; every three seconds the verb resounds at full volume and gives him no peace. The word would do better to remain in Celan's detour garden, having scarcely any application at all outside this poem."
The two acquaintances talk about the length of words in Celan (words that have four letters, and so forth), but that seems idle because it isn't a consistent preoccupation, either of theirs or Celan's. The second half of Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Amgel is preoccupied with an anatomy textbook that Celan owned and annotated, but again no reading emerges, and the book is more a prompt for the narrator's daydreams.
It feels like Tawada has read back and forth in Celan, skimming and picking out words, and that she's realized there is more, but is not ready to think about it in fiction. For me the book is an exemplary contrast between a permissive, indulgent form of writing that links words and associations, creating a pleasant light surrealism with hints of linguistic depths—and a dense, tortured, careful, desperate poetics that counts itself lucky to have a few small victories over language. Diffuse and dense.
There's a generous review of this book by Adam Thirlwell in the London Review of Books. He notes Tawada's wandering themes, her interest in the "materiality of individual words," and her penchant for counting letters, but for him those aren't signs of distance from Celan. "In this universe invented by Tawada," he writes, "Celan becomes gentler and less anguished." (November 21, 2024) I find this faulty in its generosity: the Celan in Tawada's narrator's mind is whimsical, numerologically inclined, and easily multilingual. That's not Celan in any reading I know, and it's so much weaker than his linguistic imagination that it doesn't help me think about anything except her distance from his poems.
Writing issues
The price of admission to a fictional book on Celan really should be a general familiarity with the poet. Tawada hasn't made up her mind how much her readers know, and as a result she's continuously twisting her narrative to accommodate introductions.
"Suddenly it occurs to him that Czernowitz, the birthplace of Paul Celan, is now a Ukrainian city." This would have occurred to him as soon as he learned about it, which would have been years earlier.
"'Oh, of course' [the patient says] 'There are always several languages present at the same time with Celan..."
It seems he can only be informing readers, because both the patient and his friend are already playing with languages. The patient might more plausibly have said, "Oh, of course, I had forgotten how Hebrew and German work in these poems..."
"Do you know the poem 'No sand art anymore, no sand book, no masters'?"
"Oh yes, of course. It's from Breathturn..."
"So you must also know the last lines of this poem..."
This might make sense in a seminar, where a teacher reminds a student. Why not write it as it might have been spoken? For example:
"Remember 'No sand art anymore, no sand book, no masters.'"
"And its last lines."
Conclusion
I would have been interested to read a book in which Tawada has two friends meditate on their distance from Celan and how their imaginations can't find his. There are elements of that here in the way they use Chinese medicine, numerology, and a handbook of medicine to think about his poems. But those passages are overruled by many pages where congenial trains of poetic thought are imagined to be adequate or thoughtful responses to Celan.
Tawada: a diffuse imagination, taking momentary delight in language, polylingualism, learning, and translation, and depending on a largely unarticulated sense of what creates poetic effects.
Celan: one of the most vexed and myopic archaeologists of language, with an imagination so dense it almost prevented him from writing.
-
This is a diffusely imagined poetic meditation on Celan, set as a series of conversations between "the patient" (a person contemplating presenting a paper at a conference on Paul Celan) and a "trans-Tibetan" man who unexpectedly and unaccountably joins him in cafes to talk about Celan.
For me, Celan is a model of dense imagination. His later poems, like the collection Fadensonnen (translated here as Threadsuns), are models of vocabulary- and image-building on a microscale: each poem invents its own words, syntax, and imagery. The poems are both tight and enigmatic. They appear as finely crafted as German morphemes will permit, and at the same time open to unusually wide ranges of meaning, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean Bollack, John Felstiner and others have shown.
Yoko Tawada has a diffuse imagination. Her writing depends on a sort of free association, for example here, as the two acquaintances move from one topic to another:
"The woman walking in front of the patient casts a long shadow from which a bat suddenly flies up, vanishing behind a rain gutter. Anyone who casts a shadow is human. The patient feels like a bat that couldn't manage to escape and now remains shackled to a laboratory table. The backs of its wings must be thoroughly investigated. The operating lamp is an enormous showerhead with five blinding eyes. The bat is yanked from the dark and subjected to cruel luminescence. It's said that songbirds generally bleed very little. A bat is a winged songmouse. Its song is an acquired taste possibly necessitating an acquired immunity..."
This passage continues for a page or two. It's aimless in the sense that it relies on juxtapositions between adjacent thoughts to generate expressive meaning. The skips and feints from bats to medicine, German words to Celan's neologisms, singing to illness, biology to voyeurism (the narrator is following an opera singer), all create a loosely associative frame of mind. It's a genial surrealism. For me, this is a universe away from Celan's taut, fastidious, compressed way of writing, and the text registers no awareness of that gulf.
In a handful of passages these informal trains of associative thought come together, and suddenly it's possible to imagine a real reading of Celan:
"The patient can't get the verb koepfeln (to dive headfirst) out of his head; every three seconds the verb resounds at full volume and gives him no peace. The word would do better to remain in Celan's detour garden, having scarcely any application at all outside this poem."
The two acquaintances talk about the length of words in Celan (words that have four letters, and so forth), but that seems idle because it isn't a consistent preoccupation, either of theirs or Celan's. The second half of Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Amgel is preoccupied with an anatomy textbook that Celan owned and annotated, but again no reading emerges, and the book is more a prompt for the narrator's daydreams.
It feels like Tawada has read back and forth in Celan, skimming and picking out words, and that she's realized there is more, but is not ready to think about it in fiction. For me the book is an exemplary contrast between a permissive, indulgent form of writing that links words and associations, creating a pleasant light surrealism with hints of linguistic depths—and a dense, tortured, careful, desperate poetics that counts itself lucky to have a few small victories over language. Diffuse and dense.
There's a generous review of this book by Adam Thirlwell in the London Review of Books. He notes Tawada's wandering themes, her interest in the "materiality of individual words," and her penchant for counting letters, but for him those aren't signs of distance from Celan. "In this universe invented by Tawada," he writes, "Celan becomes gentler and less anguished." (November 21, 2024) I find this faulty in its generosity: the Celan in Tawada's narrator's mind is whimsical, numerologically inclined, and easily multilingual. That's not Celan in any reading I know, and it's so much weaker than his linguistic imagination that it doesn't help me think about anything except her distance from his poems.
Writing issues
The price of admission to a fictional book on Celan really should be a general familiarity with the poet. Tawada hasn't made up her mind how much her readers know, and as a result she's continuously twisting her narrative to accommodate introductions.
"Suddenly it occurs to him that Czernowitz, the birthplace of Paul Celan, is now a Ukrainian city." This would have occurred to him as soon as he learned about it, which would have been years earlier.
"'Oh, of course' [the patient says] 'There are always several languages present at the same time with Celan..."
It seems he can only be informing readers, because both the patient and his friend are already playing with languages. The patient might more plausibly have said, "Oh, of course, I had forgotten how Hebrew and German work in these poems..."
"Do you know the poem 'No sand art anymore, no sand book, no masters'?"
"Oh yes, of course. It's from Breathturn..."
"So you must also know the last lines of this poem..."
This might make sense in a seminar, where a teacher reminds a student. Why not write it as it might have been spoken? For example:
"Remember 'No sand art anymore, no sand book, no masters.'"
"And its last lines."
Conclusion
I would have been interested to read a book in which Tawada has two friends meditate on their distance from Celan and how their imaginations can't find his. There are elements of that here in the way they use Chinese medicine, numerology, and a handbook of medicine to think about his poems. But those passages are overruled by many pages where congenial trains of poetic thought are imagined to be adequate or thoughtful responses to Celan.
Tawada: a diffuse imagination, taking momentary delight in language, polylingualism, learning, and translation, and depending on a largely unarticulated sense of what creates poetic effects.
Celan: one of the most vexed and myopic archaeologists of language, with an imagination so dense it almost prevented him from writing.
December 7, 2025
The beard is a sort of burqa concealing a proud masculine silence. By remaining silent, you obliterate your conversation partner. That’s why Celan writes of a blind silence.
I’d guessed wrong. This wasn’t a critical piece on Celan. It’s a threadsun linking Covid, poetry and a hapless child of god.
Everyone should read this. It offers a portal to something elusive, enigmatic and ultimately more transformative than the prophetic ramblings of certain Scandinavian novelists.
I’d guessed wrong. This wasn’t a critical piece on Celan. It’s a threadsun linking Covid, poetry and a hapless child of god.
Everyone should read this. It offers a portal to something elusive, enigmatic and ultimately more transformative than the prophetic ramblings of certain Scandinavian novelists.
March 14, 2021
Die Lyrik ist an sich eine Fremdsprache. Sie ist meine Nahrung, manchmal bin ich ihre Nahrung.
July 29, 2024
“There’s always a song to sing but first a silence must be created for the song to be born in.”
"He's losing his sense of time, which doesn't bother him, as time can't be measured with the senses anyhow. Our sense of time is always imaginary. Timelessness, on the other hand, is definitely a real sensation. It began when all the concert halls closed.
This is a gorgeous book. It’s not a book for everyone. It’s definitely not a book for folks who like a plot—though there is a thread of one tangled in the layers of language and image. This is a novel of language and ideas. Personally, I love this kind of novel.
I am a complete Tawada novice. In fact, I’d not even heard of her before discovering this book (thanks to a GR group). But I do love the poetry of Paul Celan. I don’t think you have to know his poetry to enjoy the novel, but if you do, you’ll appreciate the ways this volume is in conversation with his poetry and his life. I find myself drawn to Celan’s poems, even though mostly I don’t quite understand them. His words and images jam into each other to create fractured edges that overlap each other, so that the fragments and fissures refract and amplify meaning. For me, that is much the way Tawada’s book worked.
The book is set in Berlin soon after the Covid lockdown. Public life is resuming, but not fully normal—coffee shops are open, for instance, but it seems that concert halls are still closed. There are two narrative perspectives: one gives us “the patient”, the other, “Patrik”. I cannot quite tell if these are to be read as two different narrators, or the same narrator giving us different perspectives on the principal character. At times, the perspective switches abruptly, even within the same apparent thought. The “patient” ones are definitely more detached (and might be read as Patrik describing his perception of how others perceive him in those scenes), the “Patrik” ones more intimate. (These might be read as a narration of his thought process phrased in the third person.) The story proceeds through association of ideas and wordplay. It’s definitely a novel to dive into, and let the flow of words and images and memories take you where they will.
I loved the book so much, I immediately decided to go back to the beginning, and read it again. Already by page 14 I am noticing things that tie into the later flow of image and idea that I had missed or forgotten in the first time. I particularly love novels that play with the concept of time, and this one does that too.
Some in the GR group discussion classed this as an unreliable narrator, but I’m not sure I entirely agree. In my own reading it was always fairly clear which parts were memories, and which were the current thought processes. You could read the principal character as neurodivergent. I think that approach helped me follow (and appreciate) the thought threads.
Opera plays an important role in Patrik’s experience, and I wish I were more familiar with both Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Strauss’ I feel like I missed some richness by not knowing these. I looked up the plot summary for the Strauss in Wikipedia, because I know next to nothing about that. The summary isn’t a subsititue for knowing the opera, but it did deepen my sense that the question of human connection, specifically the loss of the connection during the Covid lockdown, and the quest to regain it, is at the heart of the book. I'm not sure that is the only thing the book is "about", but it feels to me like an essential part. It is also very much a novel that delves into the interplay of time, memory, and the ways that trauma repeats itself throughout human experience.
Altogether a most rewarding read.
"He's losing his sense of time, which doesn't bother him, as time can't be measured with the senses anyhow. Our sense of time is always imaginary. Timelessness, on the other hand, is definitely a real sensation. It began when all the concert halls closed.
This is a gorgeous book. It’s not a book for everyone. It’s definitely not a book for folks who like a plot—though there is a thread of one tangled in the layers of language and image. This is a novel of language and ideas. Personally, I love this kind of novel.
I am a complete Tawada novice. In fact, I’d not even heard of her before discovering this book (thanks to a GR group). But I do love the poetry of Paul Celan. I don’t think you have to know his poetry to enjoy the novel, but if you do, you’ll appreciate the ways this volume is in conversation with his poetry and his life. I find myself drawn to Celan’s poems, even though mostly I don’t quite understand them. His words and images jam into each other to create fractured edges that overlap each other, so that the fragments and fissures refract and amplify meaning. For me, that is much the way Tawada’s book worked.
The book is set in Berlin soon after the Covid lockdown. Public life is resuming, but not fully normal—coffee shops are open, for instance, but it seems that concert halls are still closed. There are two narrative perspectives: one gives us “the patient”, the other, “Patrik”. I cannot quite tell if these are to be read as two different narrators, or the same narrator giving us different perspectives on the principal character. At times, the perspective switches abruptly, even within the same apparent thought. The “patient” ones are definitely more detached (and might be read as Patrik describing his perception of how others perceive him in those scenes), the “Patrik” ones more intimate. (These might be read as a narration of his thought process phrased in the third person.) The story proceeds through association of ideas and wordplay. It’s definitely a novel to dive into, and let the flow of words and images and memories take you where they will.
I loved the book so much, I immediately decided to go back to the beginning, and read it again. Already by page 14 I am noticing things that tie into the later flow of image and idea that I had missed or forgotten in the first time. I particularly love novels that play with the concept of time, and this one does that too.
Some in the GR group discussion classed this as an unreliable narrator, but I’m not sure I entirely agree. In my own reading it was always fairly clear which parts were memories, and which were the current thought processes. You could read the principal character as neurodivergent. I think that approach helped me follow (and appreciate) the thought threads.
Opera plays an important role in Patrik’s experience, and I wish I were more familiar with both Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Strauss’ I feel like I missed some richness by not knowing these. I looked up the plot summary for the Strauss in Wikipedia, because I know next to nothing about that. The summary isn’t a subsititue for knowing the opera, but it did deepen my sense that the question of human connection, specifically the loss of the connection during the Covid lockdown, and the quest to regain it, is at the heart of the book. I'm not sure that is the only thing the book is "about", but it feels to me like an essential part. It is also very much a novel that delves into the interplay of time, memory, and the ways that trauma repeats itself throughout human experience.
Altogether a most rewarding read.
Read
October 16, 20243,5*
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July 15, 2024
Patrik leaves the institute each morning (or perhaps never) and always takes a left turn. He makes the same journey along the street and passes a familiar cafe. He visits his doctor who, ironically, advises him to rest and not leave his apartment (Patrik tells him he rarely does). It is a fever-dream, and Patrik is unsure if he is "somnolent or insomniac", unsure if he is awake and walking or asleep and meandering in his thoughts. He is a kind of psychic flaneur, wandering in his mind, his thoughts interweaving the poetry of Paul Celan and ricocheting between verses and memories. He is a literary scholar (supposedly a part-time professor at the putative Institute of World Literature in Berlin) but he behaves more like a deranged outpatient of an asylum. He repeatedly calls himself simply "the patient", not just as a clinical status but as a personal pronoun. He is not sure if his physician is a medical doctor or a professor of German literature. He stalks, or thinks he stalks, an American-Ukrainian opera singer; he spends much of his day counting the number of letters in the words of Celan's poems; he becomes violently angry if anyone questions the importance of Nelly Sachs and her relationship to Paul Celan; he asks the waitress at the cafe for a krater of milk; he cancels his registration for an academic conference in France when they ask him for his nationality. At the cafe, he meets a man by the name of Leo-Eric Fu, whom he describes as "trans-Tibetan" (an allusion to one of Celan's poems), and they discuss the relationship between the alphabet, the geographic meridians and the human body. Is he an eccentric madman or a hallucinating dreamer?
It is a swirling, dizzying novel that is more enjoyable if you just let its surreal images and thoughts wash over you. It is bizarre and hilarious at times:
Patrik is obsessive and monomaniacal, and yet equally quixotic and self-contradicting. It is a narrative delirium, a stream-of-consciousness in which the stream has no single current but is made up of whirlpools and eddies.
The novel touches on a number of familiar themes from Tawada's other novels—citizenship, xenophobia, nationalism and transnationalism, language and identity—but this novel is set during the COVID pandemic and it uniquely captures the dreamlike ways in which time and space seemed to misbehave. Days under lockdown felt uncountable; events from weeks ago seemed both remote and close; small permitted walks to the grocery or to a cafe were too short but, paradoxically, now seemed like miraculous adventures. Without the routine structures of work and family and regular commuting, the world seemed to turn imperceptibly slow. Under lockdown, Patrik can see himself only as a patient. The opera house and his literary institute are closed. Only his mind and the streets are open and all he has to occupy his days are rambling memories, fantasies and disquisitions on poetry.
It is a swirling, dizzying novel that is more enjoyable if you just let its surreal images and thoughts wash over you. It is bizarre and hilarious at times:
Old fashioned? Being old-fashioned isn't enough for me. I'd like to be the contemporary of Petrarch and Shakespeare. Or, even farther back, Hippocrates, the older person to appear in Threadsuns. He was obsesses with the number four, just like me. Using a marker, I wrote the four qualities warm, cold, dry, moist on the four corners of my desk. Accordingly, I always place my cup of hot coffee at the front left, cold mineral water at the back left, books at the back right, and at the front right the handkerchief for wiping my tears. I'm incapable of crying.
Patrik is obsessive and monomaniacal, and yet equally quixotic and self-contradicting. It is a narrative delirium, a stream-of-consciousness in which the stream has no single current but is made up of whirlpools and eddies.
The novel touches on a number of familiar themes from Tawada's other novels—citizenship, xenophobia, nationalism and transnationalism, language and identity—but this novel is set during the COVID pandemic and it uniquely captures the dreamlike ways in which time and space seemed to misbehave. Days under lockdown felt uncountable; events from weeks ago seemed both remote and close; small permitted walks to the grocery or to a cafe were too short but, paradoxically, now seemed like miraculous adventures. Without the routine structures of work and family and regular commuting, the world seemed to turn imperceptibly slow. Under lockdown, Patrik can see himself only as a patient. The opera house and his literary institute are closed. Only his mind and the streets are open and all he has to occupy his days are rambling memories, fantasies and disquisitions on poetry.
July 27, 2024
One of my favourite books to be published this year. Celan, the premier poet of silence and non-belonging, orients a speedy neurotic prose that lays out the existential terrain of a fragile psyche. Pretty much every succeeding sentence is an exercise in defamiliarization — one of my favourites being “there was a gap in his memory cinema.” Bernofsky probably one of the best translators working today
February 3, 2025
This particular Tawada had too much tawadaing for my taste.
October 2, 2024
Enjoyed this one a lot - reminded me a lot of Fosse's Melancholy. Very interesting stylistically, though I think I would have gotten more out of it had I been more familiar with Paul Celan's poetry.
November 24, 2024
feverish and strange……..
October 31, 2024
I should have read some Celan before starting this, but I enjoyed the neurotic prose.
Read
February 9, 2024Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is a novel of 2020. This is the year that marked Paul Celan’s 100th Birthday. It was the 50th anniversary of his death. It was Corona. And so, the novel becomes a Corona novel about Paul Celan, molded from Celan’s poetry.
The novel begins during the lockdowns of that spring. It follows Patrick, a patient and scholar of Celan’s Fadensonnen. However, it is more about Tawada’s conversation with Celan, his poetry, and the secrets behind his writing.
As in her collection Where Europe Ends, Tawada’s prose exists in a dream world. The theories and connections Tawada makes within and outside of Celan’s poetry have a very dreamlike quality to them, somehow real yet unreal, often mystical. This is not like traditional Paul Celan scholarship that Tawada is critical of. Instead, her method allows for more questioning, cross-cultural exchanges, and new layers of meaning.
Celan’s 1952 poem ‘Corona’ takes on an interesting meaning within this book. Already there are several layers to this poem. ‘Corona’ is often seen as love poem to Ingeborg Bachmann and an exploration of whether love is possible after the Holocaust. The word ‘corona’ itself has different meanings, ‘wreath’, ‘crown’, the ring of light during an eclipse, or even a more suggestive imagery. In 2020, corona takes on a different significance, perhaps only tenuous and built on loose associations, yet something worthy of exploration in Tawada’s phantasmagorical landscape.
I came across this book after starting Paul Celan’s Selected Poems. It slowly made sense to me why Tawada would feel a sense of kinship with and great respect for Celan. Poetic language that exists in another world, another way of seeing, made up of enigmatic metaphors, detached and discrete body parts, and an overwhelming sense of Fremdsein.
"In Fadensonnen. My first plan was how a surgeon would use the yarn of the sun’s rays to sew the poet’s disjointed body parts back together."
“In Fadensonnen. Mein erster Plan war, wie ein Chirurg mit dem Garn des Sonnenstrahls die auseinandergefallenen Körperteile des Dichters wieder zu-sammenzunähen.”
(Will be published in English by New Directions in July I believe!)
The novel begins during the lockdowns of that spring. It follows Patrick, a patient and scholar of Celan’s Fadensonnen. However, it is more about Tawada’s conversation with Celan, his poetry, and the secrets behind his writing.
As in her collection Where Europe Ends, Tawada’s prose exists in a dream world. The theories and connections Tawada makes within and outside of Celan’s poetry have a very dreamlike quality to them, somehow real yet unreal, often mystical. This is not like traditional Paul Celan scholarship that Tawada is critical of. Instead, her method allows for more questioning, cross-cultural exchanges, and new layers of meaning.
Celan’s 1952 poem ‘Corona’ takes on an interesting meaning within this book. Already there are several layers to this poem. ‘Corona’ is often seen as love poem to Ingeborg Bachmann and an exploration of whether love is possible after the Holocaust. The word ‘corona’ itself has different meanings, ‘wreath’, ‘crown’, the ring of light during an eclipse, or even a more suggestive imagery. In 2020, corona takes on a different significance, perhaps only tenuous and built on loose associations, yet something worthy of exploration in Tawada’s phantasmagorical landscape.
I came across this book after starting Paul Celan’s Selected Poems. It slowly made sense to me why Tawada would feel a sense of kinship with and great respect for Celan. Poetic language that exists in another world, another way of seeing, made up of enigmatic metaphors, detached and discrete body parts, and an overwhelming sense of Fremdsein.
"In Fadensonnen. My first plan was how a surgeon would use the yarn of the sun’s rays to sew the poet’s disjointed body parts back together."
“In Fadensonnen. Mein erster Plan war, wie ein Chirurg mit dem Garn des Sonnenstrahls die auseinandergefallenen Körperteile des Dichters wieder zu-sammenzunähen.”
(Will be published in English by New Directions in July I believe!)
August 6, 2024
It took me a while to get into this one, but it is witty, melancholic, lonely, illuminating, quirky, confusing, touching. Filled with paradoxes and connections. Erudite and silly. Frustrating and dense at times, but striking sentences and beautiful scenes abound at every turn. A must for lovers of Celan. And for opera lovers.
April 9, 2024
delightfully strange! music, language, words, translation…i liked the afterword by the translator
March 14, 2025
God has punished me for accepting book reccomendations from a random lady on TikTok by having me read two bad books in a row
February 3, 2025
A perfect covid fancy that lodges in your spine
April 19, 2025
So wie Paul Celan sich in Fadensonnen mit den Worten „Es sind noch Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen” verabschiedet, so beschließt Tamadas Erzähler den Roman resignativ und doch friedlich: „Er muss nicht mehr versuchen zu singen, denn der Zeitraum, den er jetzt betritt, kennt keine Musik.”
May 17, 2025
This entire novel reminds me of one of my professors but for his own sake I will leave that up to everyone else’s imagination
March 23, 2025
Off in the distance, someone is singing. It's a woman's voice, the tone quality is familiar, but the melody sounds different, in fact it's amazing Patrik can make out a melody at all. The voice hasn't soared to dizzying heights he would find overwhelming, it remains well within reach, it's just the language that evades his grasp. Where does one word end and another begin, maybe it's Czech. There's a sense of building and release in every note — even the eighth notes, possibly even the sixteenths. And so each tiny note forms a microcosm, one cosmos after another created and borne off on a great wave of breath into the future. There are no interruptions: even when a rest is indicated, you can still hear the sound of breathing.
The moon is the sole audience; it listens, inhaling every sound, growing rounder and rounder until it explodes in the night sky. Rusalka. The lunar shower of gold rains down on the singer's hair, her face is radiant, but a moment later it contorts in pain, perhaps because of the difficulty of producing notes. In a portrait, she can keep her lovely face, whereas onstage she's forced to surrender all static beauty and show this huge audience her naked, screaming musculature. A soprano's song is a cultivated scream. The singer masters the high art of controlling every strand of her vocal cords and therefore every fiber of her psyche. She can permit herself to scream from animalistic depths: the scream becomes music. She sings to the moon, for which there's no such thing as death. Patrik is only a shadow of this moon that can vanish at any moment — time need only beckon. He asks Dvořák to draw out the hour of the moon and, if possible, avoid landing on a final note. For as long as this song fills the night sky, Patrik can go on living. The moon slowly turns pale, and silence wakes the sleeper.
[118–19]
October 25, 2024
I read this book back in July. Originally written in German, Tawada’s short haunting pandemic novel is a tale on loneliness, poetry, a disruptive world and language. Susan Bernofsky deftly translated the book and the writing leaves you mesmerised. I write about it for The Telegraph Calcutta. To me, this was a thought provoking read, an unexpected one at that. I had never heard of Paul Celan before this. I was so enthused to discover a world war 2 poet who played with language and wrote about longing and displacement so excellently. Tawada captures it too well in her book. The link to my review is here- https://www.telegraphindia.com/books/...
May 13, 2024
Strange book.
November 17, 2025
I have been reading a fair amount of Japanese fiction these past months, drifting from Murakami’s dream logic to Matsumoto’s clipped starkness, from Kanae Minato and Natsu Kirino’s sharpened domestic dread to Yuzuki’s street grit and Dazai’s wounded brilliance. There is something in that literary weather that keeps pulling me back, a blend of restraint and strangeness that makes the ground tilt under your feet. So when I picked up Yoko Tawada’s Spontaneous Acts, I expected to be carried by that same current.
What I found instead was a book caught between two winds. At times it moves with real intelligence and a kind of drifting beauty. At other times it feels like a dissertation dressed as a novel, the bones of the argument showing through the skin of the story. Tawada is a writer of ideas and languages and cultural crossings, but here those ideas often step ahead of the characters, leaving them stranded in the margins.
The novel follows Patrik, a former academic researcher trying to prepare a presentation on the poet Paul Celan. He is a man eroded by indecision and therapy and an inability to anchor himself to a single national identity. Tawada writes him as a figure caught in the fog of his own thoughts, and much of the book is spent inside that fog. The boundaries between reality, memory, dream and linguistic invention keep dissolving. Tawada wants that dissolution to reflect Celan’s fractured relationship with language, but the effect is inconsistent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels like watching smoke decide which way it might want to curl.
The encounters between Patrik and Leo-Eri Fu are the most compelling parts of the book. Fu may be real or imaginary or both, and Tawada uses him to explore the long shadow cast by “othering” in literature and politics. Their conversations echo questions Celan raised about language, identity and the violence buried in the act of naming. These moments carry a strange electricity, the kind you feel before a storm.
But too often, the narrative wanders into long associative passages that drift from image to image with no firm center. Tawada’s imagination is diffuse, and she follows every spark that leaps across her mind. Some readers will find that luminous. Others will feel the thread slipping through their fingers. I found myself caught between admiration and fatigue, wanting the story to stand and speak on its own legs rather than lean so heavily on its intellectual scaffolding.
There are passages of undeniable beauty. Tawada can take a small thought and let it bloom into something eerie and memorable. But as a novel, Spontaneous Acts sometimes feels like a guest lecture that forgot to end. The ending in particular lands strained, as if something elegant had been forced into a shape it did not want to hold.
Still, for readers fascinated by Celan, by language as a battlefield, or by fiction that plays in the borderlands between cultures, there is value here. Tawada’s vision is unique, even when uneven. And her willingness to let thoughts wander into odd corners of the mind gives the book a personality that lingers after the last page.
Three stars. Plenty of light in it, but not enough heat to warm the whole room.
What I found instead was a book caught between two winds. At times it moves with real intelligence and a kind of drifting beauty. At other times it feels like a dissertation dressed as a novel, the bones of the argument showing through the skin of the story. Tawada is a writer of ideas and languages and cultural crossings, but here those ideas often step ahead of the characters, leaving them stranded in the margins.
The novel follows Patrik, a former academic researcher trying to prepare a presentation on the poet Paul Celan. He is a man eroded by indecision and therapy and an inability to anchor himself to a single national identity. Tawada writes him as a figure caught in the fog of his own thoughts, and much of the book is spent inside that fog. The boundaries between reality, memory, dream and linguistic invention keep dissolving. Tawada wants that dissolution to reflect Celan’s fractured relationship with language, but the effect is inconsistent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels like watching smoke decide which way it might want to curl.
The encounters between Patrik and Leo-Eri Fu are the most compelling parts of the book. Fu may be real or imaginary or both, and Tawada uses him to explore the long shadow cast by “othering” in literature and politics. Their conversations echo questions Celan raised about language, identity and the violence buried in the act of naming. These moments carry a strange electricity, the kind you feel before a storm.
But too often, the narrative wanders into long associative passages that drift from image to image with no firm center. Tawada’s imagination is diffuse, and she follows every spark that leaps across her mind. Some readers will find that luminous. Others will feel the thread slipping through their fingers. I found myself caught between admiration and fatigue, wanting the story to stand and speak on its own legs rather than lean so heavily on its intellectual scaffolding.
There are passages of undeniable beauty. Tawada can take a small thought and let it bloom into something eerie and memorable. But as a novel, Spontaneous Acts sometimes feels like a guest lecture that forgot to end. The ending in particular lands strained, as if something elegant had been forced into a shape it did not want to hold.
Still, for readers fascinated by Celan, by language as a battlefield, or by fiction that plays in the borderlands between cultures, there is value here. Tawada’s vision is unique, even when uneven. And her willingness to let thoughts wander into odd corners of the mind gives the book a personality that lingers after the last page.
Three stars. Plenty of light in it, but not enough heat to warm the whole room.
January 14, 2025
The narrator is a man called Patrik living in Berlin who refers to himself as ‘the patient’ in his own mind and the chapters are largely his stream of consciousness. He switches between first and third person seamlessly (because he “feels confined in a first-person prison”) so the reading experience is pretty destabilising on the whole. This is a book where there is no ‘real’ plot because the guy is just going back and forth and back and forth about whether or not to register for a conference and give a talk on his life’s obsession, a poet called Paul Celan.
Patrik lives in a world that is not unlike our own—people are expected to stay within the boundaries of wherever their nationality dictates. What he fears will happen at the conference is that people will ruthlessly pick apart his paper. He finds that he cannot vibe with the academic scene: “Scholarship is too ascetic for me. I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge.” His brother is a right-winger who wants to bomb mosques, but this seems to be commonplace as well. Since the lockdown, Patrik fears public spaces and takes comfort in his DVDs of opera performances.
One day, a man approaches him at a cafe whose nationality/ethnicity is distinctly undistinguishable, so Patrik wonders if he is Trans-Tibetan. They talk and strike up a friendship that makes Patrik feel less alone and less afraid. He even seeks out this man to talk some more, and then he finds out that actually he died on the flight to the conference and his new friend is a non-human creature sent to escort him to the afterlife. His friend literally transforms into a giant bird and flies him away. The end. Like huh??? This is how 13-year-olds end their English essays—the character wakes up and it was actually all just a dream. I get that in this book it serves a real function of revealing how Patrik’s vacillation is a limbo of his own making but I literally groaned.
Patrik lives in a world that is not unlike our own—people are expected to stay within the boundaries of wherever their nationality dictates. What he fears will happen at the conference is that people will ruthlessly pick apart his paper. He finds that he cannot vibe with the academic scene: “Scholarship is too ascetic for me. I prefer a not-yet-knowing or a no-longer-knowing to actual knowledge.” His brother is a right-winger who wants to bomb mosques, but this seems to be commonplace as well. Since the lockdown, Patrik fears public spaces and takes comfort in his DVDs of opera performances.
One day, a man approaches him at a cafe whose nationality/ethnicity is distinctly undistinguishable, so Patrik wonders if he is Trans-Tibetan. They talk and strike up a friendship that makes Patrik feel less alone and less afraid. He even seeks out this man to talk some more, and then he finds out that actually he died on the flight to the conference and his new friend is a non-human creature sent to escort him to the afterlife. His friend literally transforms into a giant bird and flies him away. The end. Like huh??? This is how 13-year-olds end their English essays—the character wakes up and it was actually all just a dream. I get that in this book it serves a real function of revealing how Patrik’s vacillation is a limbo of his own making but I literally groaned.
November 23, 2024
(2,5 stars)
I'll be the first to admit that i didn't really understand what this book was about. That might have to do with the fact that i'm unfamiliar with the work of Paul Celan, but it was also hard to follow at times because of the writing style. The decision to use first-person narration and third-person narration to write about the main character, who goes by Patrick, as well as "the patient" AND "i" felt a little crazy. If this was done to emphasize the poor mental state of the main character, that's a clever choice, but it didn't help with the readability of the book. All of this doesn't take away that i found it interesting to read. I don't think i've ever read a book that was concerned with language to this extent, so it felt unique for several different reasons. It also contained a lot of beautiful lines and interesting thoughts. Maybe i'd be able to appreciate this more upon second read and with more knowledge about Celan.
I'll be the first to admit that i didn't really understand what this book was about. That might have to do with the fact that i'm unfamiliar with the work of Paul Celan, but it was also hard to follow at times because of the writing style. The decision to use first-person narration and third-person narration to write about the main character, who goes by Patrick, as well as "the patient" AND "i" felt a little crazy. If this was done to emphasize the poor mental state of the main character, that's a clever choice, but it didn't help with the readability of the book. All of this doesn't take away that i found it interesting to read. I don't think i've ever read a book that was concerned with language to this extent, so it felt unique for several different reasons. It also contained a lot of beautiful lines and interesting thoughts. Maybe i'd be able to appreciate this more upon second read and with more knowledge about Celan.
August 10, 2025
This book has a lot of confusing information that’s totally foreign to me, but it’s presented in a way that’s very digestible and enjoyable. This is about a man who calls himself “the patient” and can’t make out what’s real or fake, has very odd ways of going about life, and obviously severely traumatized by many things that I couldn’t really make out. I rate it a 3 just because of how all over the place it was, but I did get a lot out of it like some quotes:
“A black bird. You don’t see her form until she comes down from her tree. Can so shy a singer sing at the top of her lungs? Oh yes, she’s just the one to manage this. Exaggerated shyness is a sort of traffic jam. Behind the dam, the pressure builds until it’s created enough electricity to power all the chandeliers in the concert hall.”
“…it wasn’t a pleasant experience but rather a fascinating sort of agony.”
“Earth is already populated with the dead. Their songs aren’t always beautiful, but they’re certainly worth listening to.”
I loved the overarching theme of song and opera, it was definitely a unique way of writing. The whole book was very poetic and surprisingly funny, I definitely recommend!!
“A black bird. You don’t see her form until she comes down from her tree. Can so shy a singer sing at the top of her lungs? Oh yes, she’s just the one to manage this. Exaggerated shyness is a sort of traffic jam. Behind the dam, the pressure builds until it’s created enough electricity to power all the chandeliers in the concert hall.”
“…it wasn’t a pleasant experience but rather a fascinating sort of agony.”
“Earth is already populated with the dead. Their songs aren’t always beautiful, but they’re certainly worth listening to.”
I loved the overarching theme of song and opera, it was definitely a unique way of writing. The whole book was very poetic and surprisingly funny, I definitely recommend!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 27, 2024
i think i understand this book less than when i started it, and this is a good thing for this book
This will be last year on Goodreads - while having people reading reviews is wonderful, and I always enjoy seeing what all my friends are reading are reading, I've reached a point where I no longer want to support companies, artists, platforms, people or mentalities that are actively seeking to destroy the planet, destroy creativity, entrench class divide, or any combination of those reasons. As a result, Goodreads falls under this. If you'd like to keep up with me, I will be found on Storygraph - https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile..., Substack - https://substack.com/@lewisfishr, and Letterboxd - https://letterboxd.com/lewisfishr/. This paragraph will be attached to reviews up until December 31st.
This will be last year on Goodreads - while having people reading reviews is wonderful, and I always enjoy seeing what all my friends are reading are reading, I've reached a point where I no longer want to support companies, artists, platforms, people or mentalities that are actively seeking to destroy the planet, destroy creativity, entrench class divide, or any combination of those reasons. As a result, Goodreads falls under this. If you'd like to keep up with me, I will be found on Storygraph - https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile..., Substack - https://substack.com/@lewisfishr, and Letterboxd - https://letterboxd.com/lewisfishr/. This paragraph will be attached to reviews up until December 31st.
July 2, 2025
Language may be the "house of being" but it is also a form of musculature that constricts the free movement of being. This second skeleton takes over of the human animal and induces paranoia and agoraphobia in the creature already suffering from prolonged immaturity. The second nature burrows its tendrils so deep into the first that the animal sometimes has no choice but to resort to madness or poetry (what is the difference?) as a means of escape. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel is a quirky tale of a failed academic and the power of cross-cultural poetic rumination to heal the lesions caused by language itself. Not really my cup of tea, but it definitely contains some punchy claims worth pondering over.
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