Yoko Tawada

"Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency."--Michael Porter, The New York Times

The Naked Eye

Rachel

“If a biologist were to wake up one morning as a laboratory rat, she would immediately commit suicide. I would go on living as a rat until a human killed me.”

“But in the summer it’s hot here, too.” “Summer doesn’t count. Its winter that makes people who they are.”

Translated from german, and in parts from japanese, it is an interesting project in wondering what was both added and lost. Some great passages of writing that grabbed my attention, but I wasn’t stirred by what should’ve been emotional and life changing. No particular revelations from this book, but enjoyable.

Safiya 

It was a light read, mostly cinematographic... I believe the author herself was drawn to French cinema, characteristically minimal over drama, yet passionately drifting to eccentricity... French cinema at least as it is depicted and used to be is an experimental arena for alien ideologies...
Perhaps that the narrator being lost in translation and facing the screen only describes the affluence of visual information... And language loses its use in that sense... I was closely interested in following a Russian speaking Vietnamese to Germany and France.. By the end something happens which gives an end to a mean of communicating but gives way to another... Language was never a barrier!

The Naked Eye

Reviews

Highlights