Number 78- Scattered all over the Earth- Yoko Tawada

 

URGH!

I could almost leave this review there. But I do try to give detailed write ups.

I don't know if it's a poor translation, but I really did not get on with this book in the slightest.  It took me nearly a week to read it and its only 217 pages.

I spent the whole book wondering if it's supposed to be a comedy.  If it is supposed to be a comedy it fails entirely.  If it's supposed to be serious, it hits all the wrong notes. 

Each chapter is narrated by a different character but you'd never guess by the narrative voices. Considering that there are 6 narrators over the 10 chapters, they all sound exactly the same. If you're doing multiple narrators, make them sound different. You should be able to identify a character from their voice- especially if they're all supposed to be from such disparate backgrounds as this bunch. The fact that this is supposed to be all about language and how it shapes people, that makes this sin of bad writing all the more egregious. This might be down to the translator, but since I don't speak Japanese. I have to rely on her skills in expressing the book accurately in English.

I read one of Tawada's books a few years ago and was quite meh about that one. this one is a step below meh. I actively disliked it and the whole experience of reading it. Despite the occasional nice image, it sometimes feels like it was translated by Bing translate and not a human.

The characters are uniformly unconvincing. The worldbuilding is poor at best. The forced coincidences are farcical without ever reaching the level of actual humour. The plot is almost non-existent.  A bunch of people who sound the same, despite being from Greenland, Norway, Denmark, India and Japan, wander around a few countries in a "near future" that does not feel even slightly authentic, talking about language and looking for a sushi chef so he can talk Japanese to one of the identikit characters.

Maybe I'm missing some cultural references.  Maybe it's a bad translation.  Maybe it's just a badly conceived and executed idea for a book. Whichever it is, I will not be reading any further Yoko Tawada novels.