![]() The novel’s protagonist, Hiruko, is a climate refugee cast adrift in northern Europe after. ![]() Family traumas and romantic dramas can feel like laborious pretexts to illuminate some aspect of language as lived experience. Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada Translated by Margaret Mitsutani 256 pages NEW DIRECTIONS. But the novel occasionally falters in its efforts to imbue the characters with psychological depth splitting the difference between a high-concept fairy tale and a realist novel is a hard trick to pull off. ![]() As metafiction, it succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as 'weightless gravity'. The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence. The characters all take turns as narrator, contributing their own incongruous understanding Tawada elevates the comedy of mistranslation to a principle of narrative. Tawada applies the same fairy-tale conventions-mistaken identity, unexpected metamorphosis-to the dilemmas of finding linguistic shelter in a world of rising seas and ceaseless migration. A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book AwardIn Scattered All Over the Earth, the mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, the world’s climate disaster and its attendant re. Scattered All Over the Earth Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. ![]()
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