Tosca and Knut’s stories are similar, and yet show different elements of the same predicament.
It is this that brings us to the other two stories. She quickly grows tired of writing about her past, though, and instead wants to write about the future, including the stories of her daughter Tosca and grandson Knut. The autobiography becomes a success, and she is eventually flown to West Germany to work on it more under pressure from a human boss. She writes about her childhood working in a circus, in which her trainer Ivan teaches her how to walk on two legs and eventually talk. She’s living in Kiev and working in an office when one day she decides to write her autobiography. Memoirs begins with the story of an unnamed female polar bear, whose ability to speak, write and generally communicate with humans is pretty much unquestioned. The book could possibly exist as three novellas, as the only way the parts connect is through their shared history and themes. The story unfolds in three acts, each focusing on a different bear. Memoirs of a Polar Bear is the story of three generations of famous polar bears, each attempting to fit into a human-centric world. What really sets Memoirs of a Polar Bear apart from other books, though, is where the three main characters come from: the North Pole. But even by today’s standards, it’s pretty worldly for a book to take place across three continents and to be written in German by a Japanese author (Yoko Tawada), translated into English (by Susan Bernofsky), and then reviewed in the United States (by me). Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen.In the super-globalized world of 2017, novels are often used to examine the personal challenges of immigration and adapting to different environments. 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. 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.
In Chapter One, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. 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. 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. "The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears.
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