Ego-trip. This is how one ends feeling like after reading "Etüden im Schnee" by Yōko Tawada, the story of some polar bears who do little to hold our attention, a story that stretches for so long that every page ends up feeling like 100, and which doesn't make much sense whatsoever.
And it starts well enough. The first polar bear, let's call her the matriarch,'s story is more or less interesting, with a nice touch of magic realism, treating the bear like a human that goes to conferences, works, finds love... All played more or less straight, making for some acceptable humor and a nice atmosphere. However, Tawada decides then to stretch the story with two more polar bears, the daughter and the grandson, whose adventures are really, but really really boring, and whose lives are also boring as hell. The descriptions stretch, the commentary becomes too much in your face, and the reader will stop caring at all about what is going on. Not that it makes much sense anyway <spoiler> what is Michael Jackson doing there?</spoiler>.
Bad.
The best: the first third
The worst: repetitive, narcissistic rubbish; the reader comes out of the book feeling Tawada thinks she has written a masterpiece (of course, it could be she is still scratching her head in amazement this was given the ok for publication)
Alternatives: ff you want to read about families, go for Jaume Cabré if you can; maybe Shigeko Yuki's "女中っ子"; Lucia Berlin's "A Manual for Cleaning Women"; "A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas" by Virginia Woolf
2/10
(Spanish translation by Belén Santana)
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