According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”
Tawada’s latest novel, “Scattered All Over the Earth” (New Directions), imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Her odyssey becomes a fairy-tale test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.” Tawada has been described as the world’s leading practitioner of “exophonic literature,” or writing in a foreign language, a description that her unique practice has made applicable to nearly all her work. “I have to let my German go when I work with Japanese,” she has said. “I don’t want to get familiar with one language.” The constant shuttling has more to do with existential displacement than with cross-cultural exchange: Tawada, as the new novel’s English translator, Margaret Mitsutani, has observed, is “not nearly as interested in crossing borders as she is in the borders themselves.”
Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day. Then there’s the awkward narrative problem of how to turn what some have termed the “boring apocalypse” — a period of stasis that, for the most fortunate, has been defined by staying home and doing nothing — into a gripping story.
Philip Olterman was born and brought up in West Germany, coming to the UK in his mid-teenage years. He studied English and German Literature at Oxford before going into journalism and is now Berlin Bureau Chief for a UK newspaper. All of this experience is brought to this short book which is an outstanding creative work. I say “creative”, because although this is a work of non-fiction, it is non-fiction of the most creative kind.
With her piercing, lovely verse, Boyce-Taylor almost takes on the role of Lorde, a mentor who lifts other women with word weapons, unapologetic in delineating true experience. Once again Boyce-Taylor has written a set of affecting poems, her language packed with the complex emotions of being that aren’t always easy to sift through.
Sheilas: Badass women of Australian History is an acerbic exploration of civil disobedience, competitive swimming, and the revolutionary setting of personal boundaries. From bushrangers to mermaids, this beautifully illustrated girls-only gathering redefines what it means to be a good Australian woman.
The development of online “wallets” might seem particularly bloodless — what, those things you use sometimes to buy stuff on the internet and often forget the password to? — and yet “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley,” by Jimmy Soni, is an intensely magnetic chronicle in which ambitions and emotions run as red-hot as they did in the Facebook movie written by Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.” It helps that PayPal’s origin story, though essentially an ensemble piece, features two of the more complicated antiheroes of our time: Peter Thiel, who has become a significant player in right-wing politics, and Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, who makes aggressive forays into the cosmos.
I want those championing freedom
the patriots of peace
the ones who march into our schools
handcuff our history
hold our imaginations hostage
the so-called American dreamers