Memoirs of a Polar Bear - Softcover

A distinguished contribution to the unique paranoid style of the new European novel.--Anis Shivani

Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in a mobilized world.--Benjamin Lytal

A writer of scrupulous intensity.

As acrobatic with her writing as her polar bear subjects, Yoko Tawada walks a line between fantastical yet believable.

Tawada bears out the truth that tongues can also bring inventive thoughts to vibrant life.--Steven G. Kellman

Ms Tawada brings her fine-nosed, soft-furred beasts to life... [Tawada] has a deadpan wit and disorienting mischief all her own, nimbly translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.

In 'Memoirs, ' when a polar bear walks into a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no troubles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs. As with Kafka's animal characters, we are freed to dislike them in the special way we usually reserve only for ourselves.--Rivka Galchen

Tawada asks us to see writing from an unusual perspective: it is like balancing on a ball, or hunting. Thus we're forced to see writing not just as a cerebral art but a physical one, as well.--Chad W. Post

Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.

Tawada's accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency.

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.”