The Emissary
Written by Yoko Tawada
Narrated by Julian Cihi
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"
Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers "the beauty of the time that is yet to come."
A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out "the curse," defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.
Yoko Tawada
Yoko Tawada (Tokio, 1960) se trasladó a Hamburgo cuando tenía veintidós años y se instaló en Berlín en 2006. Escribe tanto en japonés, su lengua materna, como en alemán. Ha publicado novelas, cuentos, piezas teatrales y ensayos, y ha recibido numerosos galardones, como el Premio Akutagawa, el Tanizaki, el Adelbert von Chamisso y la Medalla Goethe. En Anagrama ha publicado Memorias de una osa polar (Premio Warwick para Obras Traducidas Escritas por Mujeres): «Lean con un lápiz en la mano. No dejarán de subrayar frases inteligentísimas» (El Mundo). El emisario ganó el National Book Award en 2018.
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Reviews for The Emissary
12 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I approached this book with so much hope: the cover, the title, the promise of a Japanese story got me ready to sink deep into a different world. But what I found was not a world, but rather a scketch, someting like a low structured dream, of which one cannot remember the plot, but only a few sequences. And exactly like in a dream, the story ends abruptly and you are left with trying to make sense of things and connect the dots.
From time to time, the writing style was intimate and delicate, so I kept hoping that the story will eventually agreggate, but it never did. The writer’s emissary never reaches the audience...
I finished the book, just because i had the ambition to do so, but it never repaid the time and energy ...