The hairs growing out of the backs of his fingers were like shoe brush bristles. I took the man’s index finger into my mouth and sucked on it, that calmed me. My tongue could still remember the taste of my mother’s milk.
My life force resided, for the most part, in my claw-fingers and tongue. Everything I saw and heard lacked contours. Every stumble moved me forward, but could you call that walking? Fog shrouded my field of vision, and my ears were echo chambers. I couldn’t walk very well yet, though my paw-hands had already developed the strength to grasp and hold. Without my fluffy pelt, I’d have been scarcely more than an embryo. Everyone would have laughed if I’d used the word ‘cosmos’ in those days: I was still so small, so lacking in knowledge, so newly in the world. Innocent, I opened my anus to the cosmos and felt it in my bowels. Now I was a sickle moon, still too young to imagine any danger. Then I lifted my rump to the sky and slid my head below my belly. I may also have emitted a few hoarse shrieks. I curled up, becoming a full moon, and rolled on the floor. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.Someone tickled me behind my ears, under my arms. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to or call 03. Memoirs of a Polar Bear is published by Granta. That process is the book’s deeper subject. In spite of links to the real histories of the three animals (particularly Knut, whose short life was obsessively recorded), these are dislocated and dreamlike fictions that disturb expectations: it’s not so much that the bears can interact with humans, read newspapers and, in the case of Knut’s grandmother, write an autobiography, but that these magical scenarios do not add up to a “world” rather, we are never allowed to forget that these are the imaginings of a writer who can change direction on a whim. The third is Knut’s own story of the powerful bond he formed with his keeper, only to be separated from him when the bear’s size and power began to pose a danger.
The first portrays the life of Knut’s Russian-born grandmother, the second that of his mother, Tosca, a circus performer. Each explores one generation of a real-life family tree, that of Knut, the polar bear born in a Berlin zoo in 2006 who, while his babyhood cuteness lasted, was adored by the world. T he recent winner of the inaugural Warwick prize for women in translation, Tawada’s story, translated by Susan Bernofsky, consists of three novellas, originally written in German.
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