![]() ![]() And in the final chapter, Knut, Tosca’s son, is able to speak to other animals but is completely incapable of communicating with humans except through physical gestures. Still, she finds a way to communicate with at least one human, but she is only able to do so through a strange sort of thought-transmission in a dreamlike state. Tosca, like her mother, is a circus performer, and one of her handlers suggests teaching her to spell words as a stage trick, but the idea is shot down and deemed impossible. ![]() In the following chapter, Tosca, the first bear’s daughter, lacks the ability to read or write. No indication is ever given to suggest that these abilities are out of the ordinary for a polar bear. In the first chapter, an unnamed polar bear living in a Cold-War era Soviet Union openly and clearly communicates with human beings through both speech and writing. Memoirs of a Polar Bear follows three generations of polar bears, and with each generation, not only are there changes in culture, politics, and technology, but the degree of anthropomorphization sharply decreases. ![]() Many features remain the same, of course, and there is typically an overlap in time and space, but even in the short span of a generation or two, so much changes. In reading Yoko Tawada’s latest novel, it is impossible not to consider the vast ways in which the world a person inhabits differs from the world of his or her ancestors. ![]()
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