Bookclub
Read German literature

with Yoko Tawada's "Memoirs of a Polar Bear"

Tue, 02/13/2018
6:30 PM Goethe-Institut Montreal

Attention: this book club takes place on a Tuesday.

The upcoming book club of the season of Lisez l'Europe features a book from Germany.

The book chosen for this session is "Memoirs of a Polar Bear", by Yoko Tawada. The discussion will be held in French and moderated by Marie-Pierre Poulin, director of the library for the Goethe-Institut Montreal. 

About the book:

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. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both 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. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. 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. 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... 

Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.” (chapters.indigo.ca)

The book (in French) can be obtained at the following libraries:
Librairie Gallimard 514 499-2012

Librairie Olivieri 514 739-3639

​Librairie du Square 514 845-7617

The ebook can be purchased from chapters.indigo.ca.

French and English copies (as well as ebooks) are available through the Grande Bibliothèque and the Montreal public library system. One German copy is available at the Goethe-Institut Montreal.