The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. A perfect story.Yoko Tawada-winner of the National Book Award-presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin Three Streets Fiction This klein aber fein addition to Tawada’s oeuvre, translated elegantly by Margaret Mitsutani, compresses plenty of its author’s trademark offbeat brilliance into a pleasingly short format.Įach ‘street’ in the volume, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is both charming and unnerving.This may well be Tawada’s finest work, partly because of how moving it is when someone capable of so much wit knows when to be reverent. On Kollwitzstraße, Majakowskiring and Puschkinallee, Tawada conjures a series of ghostly encounters with the past, present and supernatural possibilities of our history-heavy city. In her latest work of fiction Three Streets, Tawada brings her remarkable intelligence and linguistic playfulness to bear on the cityscape of Berlin itself – or, more specifically, its former East. Kevin Canfield - World Literature Today In time, though, they cohere into engrossing meditations on historical memory and the oft-baffling nature of life in this century.”
From one moment to the next, her narratives can be mystifying. “The mystery of what it means to be human”-this phrase, which pops up early in “Kollwitz Strasse,” is an apt description of what Tawada aims to explore in these stories. It pursues a left project not only in form but also in content-an engagement with the plight of the poor, the disenfranchised, the forgotten-and leaves her readers no doubt that, at the end of the day, her project has political stakes. Three Streets is one of the most explicitly dialectical works in Tawada’s oeuvre. These stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that’s written into the urban landscape. Tawada’s strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else’s story or one’s own.
Rivka Galchen - The New York Times Magazine
Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman. Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.
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