Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    Audiobook8 hours

    Memoirs of a Polar Bear

    Written by Yoko Tawada

    Narrated by Paul Woodson and Christa Lewis

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    TranslatorSusan Bernofsky
    Release dateMar 14, 2017
    ISBN9781541470231
    Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    Author

    Yoko Tawada

    Yoko Tawada (Tokio, 1960) se trasladó a Hamburgo cuando tenía veintidós años y se instaló en Berlín en 2006. Escribe tanto en japonés, su lengua materna, como en alemán. Ha publicado novelas, cuentos, piezas teatrales y ensayos, y ha recibido numerosos galardones, como el Premio Akutagawa, el Tanizaki, el Adelbert von Chamisso y la Medalla Goethe. En Anagrama ha publicado Memorias de una osa polar (Premio Warwick para Obras Traducidas Escritas por Mujeres): «Lean con un lápiz en la mano. No dejarán de subrayar frases inteligentísimas» (El Mundo). El emisario ganó el National Book Award en 2018.

    Related to Memoirs of a Polar Bear

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Prophet of Nothingness

      Sep 12, 2021

      The Prophet of Nothingness
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Elaine Castillo

      Dec 1, 2020

      The writing in it is overall sort of bad, and somehow that’s been a balm, too: somehow I’m finding that I can’t bear a certain kind of good writing; it fits like an expensive coat whose style is all wrong for my body, for the climate, for the era. Th

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ten Must-Read Crime Books Set in the American West

      Dec 27, 2019

      This list of must-read crime titles forms part of a lesser-known West, an awesomely weird landscape in which the line between Good and Evil shimmers like a mirage. The post Ten Must-Read Crime Books Set in the American West appeared first on The Mill

      4 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Books We Missed in 2015

      Dec 15, 2015

      Five Books We Missed in 2015
      9 min read

    • Article

      Campbell McGrath

      Mar 9, 2021

      1. A storm of buzzards is circling outside the windowof my hospital room, looking south and east across the rivertoward the high-rise construction cranes downtown.They are a regular sight in December, buzzards migratingin particulate vortices, slow-m

      10 min read

    • Article

      Dark Tales

      Dec 2, 2021

      Dark Tales
      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2019

      I was like you once, a sealed plastic bag of water filters floating on the sea. I thought my numbers proved my time and space on earth. I thought having children was a way of creating more love. I thought thoughts I was ashamed to speak in case they

      15 min read

    • Article

      Notes From A Nothing

      Feb 14, 2020

      Notes From A Nothing
      13 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Prohibition

      Sep 10, 2021

      It had been ten days since my last fix. I knew what I was going to do was wrong, but unless you knew the yearning that your body exerts, the internal pull which strangles your very soul into submission, then you cannot judge me. Yes, it was wrong. Ye

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Paper Wasp

      Jun 3, 2019

      The Paper Wasp
      13 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems by Brenda Shaughnessy

      Dec 15, 2017

      Watching little Henry, six, scoop up blueberriesand shovel them into his mouth, possessed. I’m so glad I brought blueberries—wish my kidscould/would eat them. Cal can’t; Simone won’t. Henry’s sisters, Lucy & Jane, took turns feeding eachother goldfis

      3 min read

    • Article

      What’s the Point?

      Sep 23, 2019

      What’s the Point?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reports From Near And Far

      Nov 25, 2021

      susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

      17 min read

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      So Human, So Beautiful

      Dec 11, 2013

      So Human, So Beautiful
      4 min read

    • Article

      Noctuary

      Sep 2, 2021

      Noctuary
      11 min read

    • Article

      Dancing

      Sep 1, 2022

      Dancing
      14 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium on Childhood

      Sep 1, 2021

      A Symposium on Childhood
      25 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 4, 2024

      Security confiscated the bracelet I’d slipped into my wallet but not the thin black sweater I wore as I walked out of Macy’s. The sweater still had its price tag and was so soft it soothed whoever was whispering “more, more” in my ears adorned with s

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Memoirs of a Polar Bear

    3.5/5

    52 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      There were parts of this book that I enjoyed, but ultimately I think I'm just too much of a philistine to enjoy the type of litfic that goes nowhere in particular and eventually just kind of randomly stops.
    • 4/5
      Three generations of a Polar bear family, each living in close proximity to humans, must try to make sense of an unnatural life. Definitely a unique plot written in marvelous prose, which frequently made me chuckle. Tawada is able to illustrate and point out many of the idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies, and absurdities of human cultures compared to life in the natural world. Ultimately, the reader sets down the book with feelings of embarrassment and shame, for good reason!
    • 4/5
      Etüden im Schnee is - amongst other things - a book about three (polar) bears and a little girl. But it's the magic-realist three bears novel that you might imagine Günter Grass, Angela Carter and Richard Adams getting together to write. Part one is narrated by the grandmother bear, who is writing her memoirs in between riding a tricycle in a Russian circus; part two is a joint effort by the East German mother bear Toska and her circus trainer Barbara, and part three is again a bear's-eye-view narrated by a slightly-fictionalised version of the greatest real polar-bear-celebrity of our times, Knut of the Berlin Zoo. There's also a guest appearance by a well-known US musician. Although it touches on World War II, the division and reunification of Germany, climate change, and other big topics, this isn't really a political novel - its real focus is on the relationship between people and animals. Tawada tries to get past the anthropomorphism and sentimentality to dig into what is really going on when people interact with animals. Interesting, beautifully written, and technically very ingenious, but I don't know if the result is really worth the effort.The only obviously Japanese thing about this book was the use of coloured printed paper (with Arctic motifs) for dividers between the chapters, which I thought was a rather nice touch. Less successful was the idea of setting the entire text in Futura. I can't see what that was supposed to achieve - it is a typeface that really doesn't look good when it's packed together to fill a page.
    • 4/5
      I was immediately so curious when this book started showing up on recommendation lists. Described as a strange magical tale of three celebrity polar bears, in translation by a Japanese-German author - it was impossible that I could resist for long.

      In the first part, an unnamed polar bear, a circus performer turned memoirist, becomes (unwillingly) a symbol for those opposed to the Soviet regime. In the second, her daughter, Tosca, is recruited from her career in the theater by an animal trainer trying to design a thrilling new circus routine. In the third, Tosca's son, Knut, becomes an international celebrity when he is born in a Berlin Zoo.

      Examining home, identity, creative life in Communist countries, and even translating literature with a melancholic voice that often reminded me of Banana Yoshimoto. Only, you know, with polar bears and circuses. This book was a strange delight.
    • 2/5
      I really did not enjoy this book.I picked it up based upon an Amazon recommendation and all the praise heaped upon it by literati. Perhaps I should have taken more note of how many times the word 'strange' was used in reviews.It seems to be a book about Communism, and human interaction, and exile. It's certainly surreal. It's three parts are about three generations of polar bears who live among humans: the grandmother a famous writer; the mother a famous ballet dancer and circus performer; the child a famous resident of a zoo.I'd somewhat perceive a point only to lose it as the story wandered off on some tangent or non sequitur. I'm perfectly convinced this is my deficiency as surrealism is not my thing. I also did not enjoy the choppy writing style. I assume this was the author's intended voice, rather than an artifact of a Japanese author writing in German and then translated into English.I can't recommend it but perhaps big fans of Kafka would find this right up their alley.
    • 4/5
      Ice, Ice, Baby"Memoirs of a Polar Bear" is the 2016 English translation of Tawada's 2014 German language version "Etüden im Schnee" (Studies in the Snow) of her original 2011 Japanese language novel "雪の練習生 Yuki No Renshūsei" (Trainee in Snow). No details are provided here, but as Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, she probably did her own initial translation as well. The title change in English was presumably made to increase marketability.Even though Tawada provides her polar bears with anthropomorphic (human-like) characteristics, even going so far as to letting them read and write, this is not a cutesy animal fable. It will cause you to think about the issues of animals in zoos and circuses providing so-called "entertainment" and even though their human-like thoughts here would be unlike animal thoughts in reality, you will still have cause to ponder what animals must be thinking.Tawada takes this to the utmost fantasy extreme in her first generation of polar bears, where the Grandmother publishes her own autobiography and is a guest speaker at conferences. This is the most entertaining and unexpected part of the book. The middle generation of Tosca is a more conventional circus bear with the story being told from the point of view of her trainer Barbara. The 3rd generation is Knut who grows up in the Berlin Zoo after being rejected as a cub by his mother Tosca. If the cub's name sounds familiar it is because it is obviously based on the real-life Knut who grew up in the Berlin Zoo under similar circumstances (Warning: If you Google the real-life Knut, you will likely get a spoiler for how the story ends, if you don't know that already). Human names have been changed but many elements of Knut's story are identical. You have just never read or heard it told from Knut's point of view before.So yes it is a fantastical tale, but it is a human story as well. Even if some of the humans just happen to be polar bears.
    • 3/5
      Most definitely a very odd story, but there are many layers involved and I think it illustrates several themes quite well, despite the eccentric manner in which the author chose to tell the story (via polar bears). I would say that this book has a lot of similarities with a style I've seen very often lately in German literary fiction - another example would be BEFORE THE FEAST.In MEMOIRS OF A POLAR BEAR, Yoko Tawada examines what it means to be human by using polar bears to narrate stories of life in circuses and zoos. The story is quite existentialist, and consequently, absolutely fascinating. Tawada also probes themes such as love versus imprisonment (we humans capture animals and force them to perform circus acts which is cruel, but the trainers feel real love towards these animals/captivity in zoos is cruel, but we love zoos because we love animals), human nature versus animal nature (the author boldly crosses boundaries between the two), and of course, because this is a book narrated by polar bears, there are subtle but strong references to climate change.This book is definitely an acquired taste.