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A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself the patient, is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, What have you done to your head? I dont want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp! He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he cant manage to get past the first question on the registration form: What is your nationality? Then at a caf (or in the memory of being at a caf?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The mans name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik

In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaos Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchis Requiem, and Thomas Bernhards Wittgensteins Nephew, Yoko Tawadas mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.