- Hardcover: 200 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. (17 Sep 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0393040372
- ISBN-13: 978-0393040371
- Product Dimensions: 23.9 x 15.5 x 4.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 748,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
The hero of Rafi Zabor's first novel is an alto saxophone virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Shakespeare-and Blake-quoting bear whose keen sense of irony protects him from the double loneliness of the artist and animal in an underappreciative metropolis.The scion of a long line of European circus bears (and the product of an amazing roll of the genetic dice), the Bear, when we first meet him, is eking out a living doing a routinely humiliating street dancing art with his friend and keeper, Jones. But what the Bear is really best at -- besides making himself cosmically miserable -- is playing the alto with his world-calls set of chops. One day he makes a bold foray from their apartment to jam with Arthur Blythe and Lester Bowie -- real-life musicians rub elbows with fictional counterparts throughout the novel -- at a New York club, thus beginning a musical and romantic odyssey. A nightclub bust followed by long dark nights of the soul in New York City's dankest jail. Freedom, a recording contract, underground fame, a road tour that is alternately hilarious, scary, ridiculous, and inspiring. A vexed, physically passionate, and anatomically correct interspecies love affair with a beautiful woman named Iris. And, finally, a triumphant return to a jazz club inside the Brooklyn Bridge, where the Bear plays a solo where it all comes together for him, and blows him all the way back home.
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First Sentence
it was a hot day and the Bear worked hard for his money, dancing to Jones' harmonica, a disco cassette, a couple of Austrian marches and some belly-dance music. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
it was a hot day and the Bear worked hard for his money, dancing to Jones' harmonica, a disco cassette, a couple of Austrian marches and some belly-dance music. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a hellaciously entertaining read: funny, melancholy, erotic, scathingly satirical. And the language occasionally reaches magical heights of realism. There are webs of words in here that will give you glimpses of actual experience itself - surely the ultimate writer's conjuring trick. The book's hero incarnates an audacious leap of the imagination: he's a Caucasian circus bear, who can talk, reads literature, studies mysticism, and... plays the alto sax. The Bear heightens the duality of human nature - part angel, part animal - in order to explore it. It's a satirical premise that illuminates many of the contradictions lurking in the depths of our contemporary social mythos - our ambivalence towards Nature red in tooth and claw, our reduction of even the most transcendent art to commodity, our acceptance of lives that are pale shadows of their potential. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be a professional musician, The Bear Comes Home will satisfy your curiosity. If you've ever been involved in the performing arts, you will recognize many of the situations. Among its many treasures, The Bear is stunningly effective as an evocation of the seemingly constant frustration and occasional epiphanies of the creative process. It's also a dead-on portrait of the jazz life, a deeply felt exploration of the complexity of human relationships. Most amazingly, The Bear himself never collapses into a man in a bear suit. It's not that tough to devise and describe an unusual protagonist. But by the third act, even faerie queens and immortal vampires descend to the same petty, mundane emotions that drive your personal soap opera as relentlessly as they do mine. The Bear is different. Although the situations he lives through are achingly human, The Bear is never quite, no matter how much Rumi he reads, how deeply he loves, how fanatically he explores the possibilities of his horn. You've never met anyone quite like The Bear, and unless you read this book, you never will.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I didn't know it was possible to write about jazz like Rafi Zabor does. I didn't know it was possible to communicate exactly what goes on in the human (or ursine) brain as one improvises music. Playing music involves an utterly non-linguistic involvement with an abstract matrix of mathematical/auditory relationships that are somehow tied in with our emotional and spiritual nature...but I could never put it into words. Zabor did.
What a read! Be warned, though, that even if you have an immense vocabulary, you will run across words you haven't yet encountered. I enjoy this -- I like to learn new words -- but occasionally Zabor's style can seem a little forced, a little hyperintellectual.
If you play music, this is required reading. And if you listen to jazz...well, this will explain to you what is going through the minds of the guys and gals on stage. Five stars!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The story of a sentient, talking jazz-playing bear and his adventures in the human world. What, in other hands, might have become a recipe for mawkishness and banality has been made by Rafi Zabor into an enchanting and quirky novel that is at times moving, hilarious, and informative. Follow that bear as he escapes from the bondage of literally playing dumb animal and attempts to succeed in the world of ordinary humans (and jazz musicians) and works out his relationship with his fomer 'owner.
I wait with frustation bordering on the pathological for Mr. Zabor's next novel.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A brilliantly sustained anthropormorphic adventure.
The story of a sentient, talking jazz-playing bear and his adventures in the human world. What, in other hands, might have become a recipe for mawkishness and banality has been... Read more
Published on 3 Aug 2000 by davidbb@hotmail.com
An exhilarating read - romantic, witty and full of insight
Simply the best book I've read for years. The scenario, a saxophone-playing bear, doesn't bode well but Zabor magically evokes a bohemian world of doomed friendship, bittersweet... Read more
Published on 27 Sep 1999
The virtual bridge between music, love and self.
Truly one of the funniest books I've read. One of the more complicated elements of music, jazz is often misunderstood, with it's complex rhythms and changing tones. Read more
Published on 31 Dec 1998
I took 1 star off because the book ended.
I didn't want it to end. The Bear was maybe, finally, figuring out where his improbable life fit in the universal scheme of things. Read more
Published on 17 Aug 1998
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