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Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Tawada, Yōko, 1960- Book - 2016 Fiction / Tawada, Yoko None on shelf No requests on this item Community Rating: 3 out of 5

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Fiction / Tawada, Yoko 4-week checkout Due 04-26-2024

Translated from the German.
"A New Directions paperbook original."
"The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears. 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, both as 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.""-- Provided by publisher.

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Polar submitted by smr on July 7, 2020, 1:47pm Polar beer

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PUBLISHED
New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2016.
Year Published: 2016
Description: 252 pages ; 21 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book

ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780811225786

ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Bernofsky, Susan,

SUBJECTS
Polar bear -- Fiction.
Emigration and immigration -- Fiction.
Human-animal relationships -- Fiction.
Allegorical fiction.