Name: Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Price: 19.70 EUR
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Author: Tawada, Yoko ; Bernofsky, Susan
ISBN: 9780811225786

Type

Physical Book

Author

Yoko Tawada

Translated by

Susan Bernofsky

Publisher

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Language

English

Pages

288

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

20.1 x 13.5 x 1.8 cm

Weight

0.27 kg.

ISBN13

9780811225786

Synopsis "Memoirs of a Polar Bear"

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."