![]() Though famous, each polar bear combats constant isolation and disillusionment. The book closes with Knut’s story, which is based on the famous real life polar bear from the Berlin Zoo. The second section follows the daughter, Tosca, who becomes a circus star when she performs the “Kiss of Death” with her human tamer. The grandmother opens the book with her account of life in the USSR, where she gains unexpected celebrity after the publication of her autobiography. Organized like a triptych, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is composed of three novella-length sections, each with a different bear as its protagonist. Defamiliarized, Tawada’s three unique polar bears are free to subvert our assumptions and thus break away from insignia to become individuals.Įach of Tawada’s three polar bears - the unnamed grandmother the mother, Tosca and the son, Knut - gains unexpected fame. Like much of the book, her description of the “hypnotically shimmering particles of light” distinguishes the polar bear from the simple icon we’ve derived. ![]() ![]() It should come as little surprise that those megafaunas in the Arctic have hair not at all like that of the white plush dolls we make of them. In Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky, she tells of how the polar bear’s snow-white color arises from the space between translucent hairs and black skin. ![]()
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