Memoirs of a Polar Bear - Yoko Tawada

Category: Literature, Novel
Language: English
Keywords: Magical Realism Saga Xenofiction

Written by Yoko Tawada
Read by Christa Lewis, Paul Woodson
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Mixed
Unabridged

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 best-selling 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.”

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
(originally translated from Japanese by the author)

March 14, 2017
8 hrs and 52 mins