Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. When nothing's happening, it finds some reason for frenetic movement, but when actual danger threatens, its responses are far too slow. Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures? Some humans claim to be made in God's image--what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our Earth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.

Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear is actually the memoirs of three polar bears: the first, an unnamed matriarch who writes an autobiography that becomes a best-seller in the Soviet Union; the second, Tosca, the matriarch's daughter, a circus performer who forges a close relationship with her trainer, Barbara; and finally Tosca's son Knut, who is brought up by human trainers at the Berlin zoo. Tosca and Knut are real--Tosca's "rejection" of Knut and the baby bear's successful adolescence at the zoo apparently having been the subject of much media obsession--but in imagining the writer-bear, Tawada gives Tosca and Knut a kind of formal pedigree that elevates them above mere bearness. The novel plays pretty loose with just how a polar bear might walk among human society: while the matriarch speaks Russian, and learns German so that she might write in it, Tosca seems to lose interest in speaking with anyone but Barbara. Knut, in the end, is the most "bear-like" of all, perhaps having lost the matriarch's gift of speech--though there are a precious few who seem to understand him, like his friend--I am not kidding--Michael Jackson.

The three sections of Memoirs of a Polar Bear do some interesting things with point of view and elements of metafiction. The matriarch's section seems to encompass both the best-selling autobiography and the process of writing it; much of it is taken up by the bear's grueling writer's block while living in exile in West Germany. Tosca's section is actually written from Barbara's perspective, though the two become so close that Tosca's "I" eventually starts to melt into Barbara's. And Knut's section pulls of what I thought was a neat trick: for a long time, it seems to be in third person, until another bear in the zoo mocks young Knut for referring to himself as "Knut"--and suddenly, as Knut learns what an "I" is, the narrative switches into the 1st person. Knut has been narrating all along. The tricks are neat, and it's a testament to Tawada's skill that the book can contain all of them without seeming gimmicky are overstuffed, but they point to certain interesting thoughts about the process of memoir and speaking about oneself. Does Tosca's need to have Barbara write her autobiography, for example, reflect a rejection of her mother's need to account for herself--to become more "bear-like" by rejecting the world of talky, wordy humans for the immediacy of bear life? And does it leave young Knut without the capability to communicate, when what he wants to do most in the world is be understood by his beloved caretaker and "mother" Matthias?

I was interested, too, in the way that the political overlays the three bears' stories. The matriarch's is a familiar story of Soviet dissidence, in which her autobiography is first celebrated, and then suddenly and mysteriously verboten; she defects to West Germany when it looks as if she'll be exiled to Siberia. (Though perhaps this would have been all right for a polar bear, who is always dreaming of cold environments, and who finds Berlin to be insufferably hot.) The politics of this section seemed sort of strange to me, as if they were a literary parody uninterested in being linked to anything contemporary. The contrast between West and East Germany is an important element of the novel, as it probably was for Tawada, who moved from Japan to West Germany in the 80s and who writes alternatingly in Japanese and German. Knut's section, on the other hand, has the bear grappling with the burden of being an avatar for climate change. Though little Knut lacks the stature or the tools of his matriarch, his notoriety at the zoo demands a kind of public account of himself, one that will stress to the world the need for conservation--a huge burden for such a little bear.

I thought Memoirs of a Polar Bear was really fun. I preferred the first and last sections, I think, perhaps not surprisingly, given the intentional narrative distance that Tawada imposes on Tosca, and which the aloof Tosca seems to impose on herself. I imagine they would frustrate a kind of reader who prizes internal consistency--when is a bear like a human being and when is it like a bear?--but the shagginess and slipperiness of Tawada's novel is part of its charm, I think.