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Spontaneous Acts by German-Japanese writer Yoko Tawada follows a fierce and scrupulous search for connection and meaning in a noisy and overwhelming world emerging from the loneliness of COVID lockdowns.
The novel follows Patrik, a literary researcher, who alternates between identifying with his name and as “the patient” – a nameless psychiatric patient consumed by his constant agitation and loneliness.
As the world opens up from lockdown, he finds it difficult rejoining the world outside. He experiences crippling agoraphobia and extreme overwhelm when he ventures out into a newly reopened Berlin. He also agonises over whether to speak at a conference in Paris on the poet Paul Celan, with whose work he shares an intense and emotionally charged connection.
Patrik is immersed in a world entirely separate to his surroundings. It’s a world padded by literature, DVD operas and his own memories. He is, however, yanked from his solitude when he meets Leo-Eric Fu, a stranger inexplicably knowledgeable about his life. Patrik half-fantasises and half-fixates on knowing Leo-Eric and being known by him.
For many people, the loneliness that settled into the periods of isolation during the pandemic was accompanied by the fear of an uncertain and bleakly imagined future. The writer Lara Feigel considers that no work written during lockdown can ever be completely void of the stasis and fear of quarantine.
Tawada wrote Spontaneous Acts in Berlin during the first lockdown in 2020. The novel’s overt and subtle references to the work of Romanian-French poet
Paul Celan connects the present with the past. This is typical of “lockdown fiction”, which tends to interweave itself with the past, such as in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece and Clare Pollard’s Delphi.
In Pollard’s Delphi, in which a mother copes with pandemic life through research into ancient Greek prophecy theory, the critic Sarah Moss suggests that lockdown writing glances backwards so often because to look forward was to stare into a frightening and expansive unknown.
Celan’s constant peripheral presence in the novel, a sort of ghostly fatherhood, is familiarly retrospective. It anchors Patrik from floating completely untethered through the overwhelming instability of his surroundings and his mind. Spontaneous Acts, furthermore, was conceived in Celan’s image.
Inspired by an anatomy book annotated by Celan, Tawada came to write Spontaneous Acts after research at the Marbach Literature Archive in Germany for an essay. Celanian poetry characteristically uses bleak imagery, fragmented grammar and new words and expressions. Tawada’s novel echoes this disintegration in its non-linear structure and includes many exact images, such as Van Gogh’s ear and the rolling dice on the first page.
The connection with the poet renders Patrik a sort of intruder wandering through an unpopulated Celanian ghost town. This ghost town is the perfect backdrop for the novel’s key themes. Here, we encounter unstable German identity, the resilience of language and the moving pleasure of translation.
The Celanian thread woven tightly throughout Spontaneous Acts seems less an attempt to stabilise and more to connect. As a Holocaust survivor, Celan has laced his work with his agony and his fragmented identity. Katherine Washburn, his translator, describes in the introduction to his collection Last Poems a dangerous union between Paul Celan the poet and Paul Antschel, as he was born, “heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories”. Just as Celan wrote in German and fractured the language of his mother’s killers, Patrik longs to connect to the world that he is deeply afraid of.
Spontaneous Acts is a love letter to language and to connection that chokes on its own pleas to be understood, and by the truly mortifying ordeal of being perceived. Patrik fears being seen by others, but also by himself. He struggles to identify with his own name or body, which often disintegrates into poetry and abstract ideas. Tawada effortlessly unfurls flesh and blood into a world of intricacies and untethered thoughts.
The novel is conscious that to be seen is to be vulnerable and unprotected. The reader maintains a distance from what is “true”, imagined and remembered. The flip side of this embarrassing vulnerability is the intimacy of gleaning meaning from the ideas and feelings of others. Tawada captures the dreamlike half-life of living entirely in memories and in literature. Carefully, she unstitches the fabric of reality and sews it back up again in new patterns.
Language is brought alive as Patrik reacts to words as he would humans, and each letter gains personality. Language is broken and reformed to produce new, surprising images; with each bizarre combination, we cannot help but say “yes, of course”.
Speckled with moments of startling dry humour, Spontaneous Acts dissects the performance of seeing and being seen by others into its microscopic parts, leaving behind a fragmented impression of loneliness, stuck with all the pieces but unable to make them fit together. This is an ode to connection and writing that, beautifully, makes sure just to fall short of being completely understood.
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Ellen Pigott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
