“Spontaneous Acts” by German-Japanese writer Yoko Tawada follows a passionate and conscientious search for connection and meaning in a noisy and overwhelming world that emerges from the loneliness of COVID lockdowns.
The novel is about Patrik, a literary researcher who identifies on the one hand with his name and on the other hand with “the patient” – a nameless psychiatric patient who is consumed by his constant restlessness and loneliness.
As the world reopens after lockdown, he finds it difficult to return to the outside world. He experiences crippling agoraphobia and is extremely overwhelmed when he ventures into the newly reopened Berlin. He is also tormented by the question of whether to speak at a conference in Paris about the poet Paul Celan, to whose work he has an intense and emotionally charged connection.
Patrik is immersed in a world completely separate from his surroundings. It is a world shaped by literature, DVD operas and his own memories. However, he is torn from his solitude when he meets Leo-Eric Fu, a stranger who inexplicably knows about his life. Patrik is half fantasizing and half fixated on knowing Leo-Eric and being known by him.
For many people, the loneliness that came with the isolation during the pandemic was accompanied by fear of an uncertain and bleak future. Writer Lara Feigel believes that no work written during lockdown can ever be completely free of the rigidity and fear of quarantine.
Tawada wrote Spontaneous Acts in Berlin during the first lockdown in 2020. The novel’s obvious and subtle references to the work of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan connect the present with the past. This is typical of “lockdown literature” that tends to intertwine with the past, such as in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece and Clare Pollard’s Delphi.
In Pollard’s Delphi, in which a mother uses research into ancient Greek prophecy theory to cope with life during the pandemic, critic Sarah Moss points out that the reason why texts about the lockdown so often look back is because looking into the future would be like looking into a frightening and vast unknown.
Celan’s constant peripheral presence in the novel, a kind of ghostly fatherhood, is familiar in retrospect. It keeps Patrik from floating completely unbound by the overwhelming instability of his surroundings and his mind. Spontaneous Acts was also conceived on Celan’s model.
Wikimedia, CC BY
Inspired by an anatomy book with notes by Celan, Tawada began writing Spontaneous Nudes after researching the Marbach Literary Archives for an essay. Celan’s poetry is characterized by gloomy imagery, fragmentary grammar, and new words and expressions. Tawada’s novel reflects this disintegration in its non-linear structure and contains many precise images, such as Van Gogh’s ear and the rolling dice on the first page.
The connection with the poet turns Patrik into a kind of intruder, wandering through an uninhabited ghost town in the style of Celan. This ghost town is the perfect setting for the main themes of the novel. Here we encounter an unstable German identity, the resilience of language and the moving joy of translation.
The Celanian thread that runs through Spontaneous Acts seems less an attempt at stabilization than at connection. As a Holocaust survivor, Celan has infused his work with his torment and fragmented identity. Katherine Washburn, his translator, describes in the introduction to his collection Last Poems a dangerous connection between the poet Paul Celan and Paul Antschel, who was born “heir and hostage to the most wrenching human memories.” Just as Celan wrote in German, fragmenting the language of his mother’s murderers, Patrik longs for a connection with the world he deeply fears.
Spontaneous Acts is a love letter to language and connections that suffocate in their own pleas to be understood and the truly shameful ordeal of being noticed. Patrik fears being seen by others, but also by himself. He struggles to identify with his own name or body, which often dissolves into poetry and abstract ideas. Tawada effortlessly unfurls flesh and blood in a world of subtleties and unbound thoughts.
The novel is aware that being seen means vulnerability and exposure. The reader keeps a distance from what is “true,” imagined, and remembered. The flip side of this awkward vulnerability is the intimacy that comes from making meaning out of other people’s ideas and feelings. Tawada captures the dreamlike half-life of living exclusively in memories and literature. She carefully unravels the fabric of reality and sews it back together in new patterns.
Language comes alive as Patrik responds to words as if they were people, and each letter takes on personality. Language is broken and reshaped to create new, surprising images; with each bizarre combination we can’t help but say “yes, of course.”
Peppered with moments of startlingly dry humor, Spontaneous Acts breaks the performance of seeing and being seen down into microscopic pieces, leaving a fragmentary impression of loneliness, stuck with all the pieces but unable to put them together. This is an ode to connection and writing that beautifully makes sure it is not fully understood.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise and get a curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions delivered straight to your inbox every two weeks on Fridays. Sign up here.
