Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Memoirs of a Polar BearThe Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness" Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away...

Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 11/08/2016
ISBN: 9780811225786
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.30w x 0.70d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 01/01/0001
Publishers Weekly 09/05/2016
Kirkus Reviews 09/01/2016
Library Journal 10/01/2016 pg. 72
Booklist 11/01/2016 pg. 26