Where Europe Begins: Stories

by Yōko Tawada

Book Overview

Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as "a spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities." In these stories' disparate settings--Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany--the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811217027
• ISBN13: 9780811217026
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.9" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Imagery Beyond the Ordinary

Tawada strikes at the very heart of the careful, selective, appreciative reader. As a Comparative Literature major, I enjoy these stories for their provocative use of words, something she is very careful to use. "The Bath" is a reflection of my childish ambition to be a simultaneous translator, yet an ambition that allowed (or forced) me to learn 7 (so far) languages other than English...with smatterings in several others. Language on this small planet is so fragile. Tawada understands that.

Writing that lives

These are beautiful stories of great imagination and warmth, and sometimes of great insight. How a person can say a bad thing about these stories is beyond my understanding. In "Storytellers without souls" Tawada writes: "Even my writing lives", which in her case is true. Like any good art: when her ideas enter us they become a part of us. Her handling of dreams, as well as her dreamlike narratives and enlightening reinterpretations of the world we all have to live in, connect her work very strongly with surrealism. Her characters' transitions between the very different languages of Japan and Germany confuse their manners of communicating with the world and with other people, and this is sometimes described in Tawada's narratives as an actual loss of language. One thing i do have a problem with is the translation of some of the texts. A number of the stories deal with the narrator's outsider relationship with the German language, but Susan Bernowsky translates the specified German words into English so the subject is lost on us. If Tawada is trying to describe to us interpretations of the German language, then why are we reading about interpretations of the English language? Original text with footnotes is always better translation than rewriting.

FANTASTIC!!!

Don't listen to the Jerseyite who wrote the two-star review. Pick up this book and you'll want to carry it around forever. Very unusual, Tawada is at the forefront of experimenting with the short story form. Like the paintings of Leonora Carrington, these stories offer us a fresh way of thinking about the world. I won't ruin with plot details, but the title story that takes place on a train is gorgeous.