is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award
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No fee was paid by the publisher for this review.
The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and human connections.ĭisclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. Threats abound-a changing climate, terrorism, and hostile political structures create danger and uncertainty-but these characters carry within themselves the seeds of a possible new world. As these people meet, hear each other’s stories, and travel to new places to solve each other’s problems, a feeling of openness and possibility emerges. Knut and Hiruko tell their stories first, followed by a trans woman from India, a German woman, an Indigenous man from Greenland, and another refugee from Japan. The novel’s form underscores this hopefulness: it moves through a series of narrators so that each character has a chance to speak. The novel celebrates crosslinguistic communication as generative, fostering imagination and friendship and offering hope in a chaotic world. Communication goes even deeper, however the characters find ways to reach one another that defy language barriers. Panska symbolizes language as a connecting force, one that challenges political and cultural boundaries. The time period and geopolitical structures of Tawada’s science fiction world remain vague, which places greater emphasis on the book’s ideas about friendship, borders, and language. From there, the two wander through Europe, making friends who join them as they try to understand a new linguistic and political landscape.
They travel to Trier to attend an umami festival in hopes that Hiruko can meet someone who speaks her childhood language. She speaks Panska, a Pan-Scandinavian language she invented that somehow everyone can understand. Knut, a Danish linguistics student, sees Hiruko, a survivor from this lost country, on television and decides he must meet her. Set in a futuristic, dystopian world reshaped by climate change, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth celebrates cross-cultural, crosslinguistic friendships.Īn unnamed country, presumably Japan, has disappeared.
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