![]() Written by acclaimed Japanese-German author Tawada, this immersive, dreamy novel follows three generations of a polar bear family grandmother, daughter, son as each tries to balance the public pressures of circus performing with the solitary satisfactions of a literary life. ![]() Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.” ![]() 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. 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. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers-who happen to be polar bears ![]()
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