During her circus days, the matriarch learned that certain actions earned praise and a sugar cube, whereas others prompted the lash-a clear parallel to life under totalitarian rule. In this first story, Tawada introduces the themes of imprisonment and repression. Soon, an organization known as KAOS, Keeping Authors Out of Siberia, arranges for her to escape the Soviet Union-she suffers repercussions for her political writings-and relocate in Germany, where a man named Wolfgang sets her up in an apartment and encourages her to complete her manuscript.
She sends pages to a literary editor, a seal known as Sea Lion, an unscrupulous sort who publishes her early pages in his magazine without telling her and slaps on the not-wholly-accurate title “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.” The memoir becomes a surprise bestseller. At the urging of her building superintendent-this is a novel in which there’s nothing unusual about a polar bear communicating with humans-she writes her autobiography. She’s also a writer, a calling that brings confinement of a different sort. After her retirement as a performer, she takes on an administrative role at the circus, for which she attends conferences and formal dinners where, in a phrase typical of the novel’s wit, she “ate heavy borscht, shoveled glistening black caviar into my mouth and accumulated a fortune in body fat.” Born in the Soviet Union, she has no memory of her mother, she is raised by a man named Ivan and becomes a bicycle-riding Moscow circus attraction, pedaling nowhere for the delight of onlookers. The protagonist of the first story is the clan’s unnamed matriarch. In the three long chapters of this new work-the witty translation is by Susan Bernofsky-Tawada has invented an allegory on the effects humans have on one another and on the earth. Tawada, a Japanese author who writes in German, has examined cultural estrangement in stories like The Bridegroom Was a Dog. $16.95.Įveryone feels constrained at times-by a dead-end job, by family members who expect certain behavior-but imagine how a circus animal must feel, such as the matriarch of three generations of polar bears that Yoko Tawada writes about in her ingenious new novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear.
New York, NY: New Directions Press, 2016.
0 kommentar(er)
