...[a] funny, subtle and strangely moving fable about the bonds that unite, and the gulfs that divide, humans and other animals ... Ms Tawada brings her fine-nosed, soft-furred beasts credibly to life. The eerie tales told by Kafka’s animal narrators have left deep claw-marks on this book. Ms Tawada, though, has a deadpan wit and disorienting mischief all her own, nimbly translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear is smart and weird, if a little muted ... the animal characters of Memoirs pursue a hybrid existence, refusing to romanticize the state of nature.
One of the features of our species, as Tawada reminds us, is that we are curious about other species...The trouble is that there is no reset. The creatures — both human and animal — have been changed by one another. The question is how we learn to love something without devouring it ... Memoirs of a Polar Bear hums with beautiful strangeness. Look at the animals we are. Look at us searching for love, for meaning, for our own true forms.
Brilliant little lines illuminate how a literary bear’s mind might work ... The ways in which the bears communicate with humans is inconsistent throughout the novel, and while the details of such an arrangement are obviously not the point of the text, this lack of specificity is occasionally frustrating. Tawada makes connections between the place of polar bears in this world and the place of the oppressed minority in the real world, but those connections don’t feel fully realized ... Tawada’s prose moves ponderously, punctuated by the occasional blunt opinion ... But, very smartly, Tawada breaks away from the mind of a bear for the middle of the book, using a human circus worker to tell most of Tosca’s story. Her perspective helps paint a complete picture ... Its power comes through in tiny moments of crystalline observation.
Memoirs gives us an often funny and intimate perspective on what it must be like to be a sentient bear in an overwhelmingly human world ... Tawada’s Knut, who is as inquisitive as he is empathic, aptly grasps the semi-ridiculous symbolism of his own life.
...[a] profoundly imaginative novel ... Memoirs of a Polar Bear refuses to become a shrill statement on displacement, or a cloying book about successfully fitting in. By maintaining a control over both the surreal quality of the situation — a wide-eyed polar bear famous for her autobiography — and the frank voice of an animal, Tawada instead imparts how bizarre is the world of man, the only animal in the animal kingdom who can lie ... Tawada uses her singular ability to probe the boundaries between culture, language and life. Packed with scenes of snow, cold and dark, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a compact novel, perfect for guiding the imagination inward during this dark time of the year.
Would it be churlish, then, to say that there’s something bearish about Memoirs of a Polar Bear? Something playful but not quite friendly, something gruff and strange. The book is neither a fantasy of wildness nor a parable of civilization but something in between, a border creature, domesticated but hardly naturalized. In defiance of the novel’s drive toward climax and resolution, and equally in defiance of memoir’s tendency to tell all and ask for absolution (or grant it), Tawada’s bears tell more or less the same story three times in a row: the passage from the incoherent sensations of infancy to the formed consciousness of the mature animal, from mutism to speech.
With its whimsical leaps of logic and wobbly focalization, Memoirs of a Polar Bear offers a welcome reprieve from the sharp, exacting contours of the linguistic realm (where the primary enterprise is sense-making), enveloping the reader in a softer, snowier landscape of love and longing in its purest form.
...[a] whimsical and wise novel ... The novel’s premise — three generations of famous polar bears who come into intimate contact with humans — is inherently playful, and Tawada nurtures this quality by putting the reality of the events of the first chapter into question in the second by describing the first chapter’s as legendary ... Tawada evokes the boundlessness and richness of possibility associated less with magical realism than with children’s fairy tales ... Memoirs of a Polar Bear puts its playfulness to serious use. With varying degrees of levity, Tawada draws parallels between species divisions and categories of human difference ... The novel’s imaginative acrobatics and philosophical depth are buoyed and energized by Tawada’s prose ... Tawada masterfully transports the reader to this place approaching transcendence, where language — so distinctly human, we suppose — brings us into imaginative intimacy with another kind of being.
