Can you imagine any author other than Yōko Tawada, who could think of writing a saga about a family of polar bears? Tawada, a japanese author writing in both Japanese and German, is a master of fantastic stories set up in magical worlds and interesting linguistics ideas. Memoirs of a Polar Bear was exactly that – a wonderful book and one of my favourites in Tajfuny Advent Calendar this year.
The Memoirs are loosely based on a true story. Knut, the polar bear, has in fact lived in Berlin Zoo in the 2000s. He was raised by his human caregiver after his mother, Tosca, pushed him away after childbirth. In the novel, the story starts with Knut’s grandmother – a polar bear, whose name we never get to know. She publishes her autobigoraphy – an act that gets on the radar of the USSR authorities. She is forced to flee abroad, first to Berlin, then as far as Canada. In the second part of the story, we get to know Tosca, a ballerina. Unfortunately, her career is dying and she decides to focus her career on the circus. The third and last part is narrated by Knut himself, a young bear learning to live among humans and animals in the zoo.
Yōko Tawada and her translator Susan Bernofsky manage to charm us and fool us. Especially in the (best, in my opinion) first part of the book I was constantly questioning my senses. Am I really reading a book about a polar bear? A real polar bear? Or is it a clever metaphor – of the “other”, of some ethnic minority perhaps? For the most part of the story our narrator seems more humane then the taciturn and often aggresive people around her, but then she suddenly does something extremely “bearly”.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear is an english translation of the German version called Etüden im Schnee. Tawada wrote the same story in Japanese as well. Yuki no renshūsei was published few year before its German and English language counterparts.
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