We then move to Knut’s mother, Tosca, a dancing bear who takes on the even more unusual authorial task of writing her trainer’s life story in what becomes a joint autobiography. We begin with Knut’s grandmother, a former USSR circus performer turned memoirist whose chronicling of her past quickly gets disrupted by her present. Each of the book’s three chapters chronicles the life of one polar bear, and each plays tricks on the classical genre of the first-person novel (historically modeled after autobiography). Memoirs of a Polar Bear is the sixth work of hers available in English it was written first in Japanese, then translated into German by Tawada herself, now translated from German to English by Susan Bernofsky.Ĭombining multilingualism with trans-speciesism, Memoirs of a Polar Bear maintains Tawada’s reliable brilliance the novel practically gloats with originality. Acclaimed in both Germany and Japan, the prolific author remains under-read in the United States. Her fiction often adopts bilingual perspectives to unsettle her readers’ relationships to language, culture, and national identity, and can perform as deadpan ethnography-albeit with frequent slides into the surreal. Tawada, who was born in Japan and has lived in Germany for much of her adult life, writes in both Japanese and German. Both a novel of ideas and Knut fan fiction, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is as densely philosophical as it is deliciously absurd, and as playful as it is poignant. Considered something of a miracle due to the improbability of his survival under these conditions, Knut quickly became a global celebrity, and in 2007, when he was not yet a year old, he landed the cover story of the German edition of Vanity Fair: a piece titled “I, Knut-A World Star from Germany.” In Memoirs of a Polar Bear, her latest book translated into English, Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada assumes a similar faux-autobiographical perspective, and imagines, with persuasive complexity, the interior lives of not only Knut, but two of his forebears.
95įew animals have captivated the world like Knut, the young polar bear rejected by his mother and raised by a human surrogate in the Berlin Zoo. Memoirs of a Polar Bear, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions, 252 pages, $ 16.
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