In this instance, it allows Tawada to examine the human race from an outside perspective. In a novel largely concerned with self-identity and isolation, these changes serve to demonstrate the disconnect between all individuals, even ancestors and their descendants.Ī novel with non-human protagonists can be a lot to ask of readers, but there is certainly a reward to this risk. And in the final chapter, Knut, Tosca’s son, is able to speak to other animals but is completely incapable of communicating with humans except through physical gestures. Still, she finds a way to communicate with at least one human, but she is only able to do so through a strange sort of thought-transmission in a dreamlike state. Tosca, like her mother, is a circus performer, and one of her handlers suggests teaching her to spell words as a stage trick, but the idea is shot down and deemed impossible. In the following chapter, Tosca, the first bear’s daughter, lacks the ability to read or write.

No indication is ever given to suggest that these abilities are out of the ordinary for a polar bear. In the first chapter, an unnamed polar bear living in a Cold-War era Soviet Union openly and clearly communicates with human beings through both speech and writing. Memoirs of a Polar Bear follows three generations of polar bears, and with each generation, not only are there changes in culture, politics, and technology, but the degree of anthropomorphization sharply decreases.

Many features remain the same, of course, and there is typically an overlap in time and space, but even in the short span of a generation or two, so much changes. Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and 'the intimacy of being alone with my pen.In reading Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, it is impossible not to consider the vast ways in which the world a person inhabits differs from the world of his or her ancestors. 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

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yōko Tawada