Yoko Tawada, _Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel_, trans. Susan Bernofsky

YOKO TAWADA WRITES fiction in both Japanese and German. From what I gather, her writing in both languages is not just a switch, as Milan Kundera switched from Czech to French or Jhumpa Lahiri switched from English to Italian, but an actual going back and forth. Remarkable, no?

She came to my attention via a review article in the LRB by Adam Thirlwell that discussed several of her novels--I picked this one because the title was irresistible. It was originally written in German.

The main character, Patrik, is also the narrator, although he usually refers to himself as "the patient" or "Patrik," only occasionally slipping into the first person. He lives in Berlin and may be German, although there is some uncertainty about his nationality. He is a Celan scholar but has no institutional affiliation, although he may have had one once. He is supposed to give a paper on Celan's volume Threadsuns at a conference in Paris, but perhaps he only thinks he is supposed to give one. In either case, he is flummoxed by the procedures he has to complete to get to the conference.

The outline of Patrik's identity, we could say, is insecurely fixed--mobile and porous. He is like a Thomas Bernhard character, a kind of laboratory animal trying to solve the maze of his own personhood and not making much progress. There is also a kind of Bernhardian eventlessness to the novel, which does not so much have a plot as a Debordian dérive as Patrik wanders about the city at the same time he is wandering through his psychological maze.

Within the maze, though, he finds a reward: Leo-Eric Fu, a deeply simpatico figure that Patrik encounters and then re-encounters. A budding friendship with Leo-Eric seems to hold out a tantalizing possibility of solving the riddle of Patrik. Leo-Eric has some kind of connection to the Asian continent, so he may be the the Trans-Tibetan Angel ("Trans-Tibetan," by the way, is a descriptor that appears in Celan's Threadsuns).

Is the last paragraph of the novel a kind of magical happy ending or the final dissolution of "the patient"? I don't know. I don't know what to conclude about the ending of "The Yellow Wallpaper," either. But we are airborne, and it feels right. Fly, Patrik, fly!