![]() ![]() ![]() With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork. ![]() Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm. It is then turned into an invention, a translation of something else, hovering between the purity of the kotodama and the sinfulness of the multilingual. In Scattered All Over the Earth, the mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, the worlds climate disaster and its attendant refugee. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition a dead whale an ultra-nationalist named Breivik unrequited love Kakuzo robots red herrings uranium an Andalusian matador. Scattered All Over the Earth relies on the affect and importance of a mother tongue and, in the same movement, suggests that this is also form of fiction. ![]() homemade language."Īs she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |