Details

ISBN-10: 081122578X
ISBN-13: 9780811225786
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 11/08/2016
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.30" W, 0.70" H

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Translator: Susan Bernofsky

Paperback

Price: $16.95

Overview

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.”

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Reviews
In this masterful performance of 'otherness, ' Tawada pushes us to feel the humming possibility between how things appear and what they could be.– "Asymptote"
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Details

ISBN-10: 081122578X
ISBN-13: 9780811225786
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 11/08/2016
Dimensions: 7.90" L, 5.30" W, 0.70" H
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