This remains one of my favorites. I read it in a darvocet-induced haze back in 2009 and it’s one of the few things I remember from those days.
Rafi Zabor’s Bear is alive in the way that Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is alive. He thinks and feels, plays in smoky jazz clubs, earning the respect of his fellow musicians. It’s easy to forget at times that we’re reading about a bear, but of course, when he retreats back to nature around the middle of the book, we see him remembering the life he’d left behind for music.
This book is also notorious for the first bear on woman sex scene, written to the hilt with plausibility! You just have to read it! And when his woman is suddenly filled with a primal urge to protect her children whom she’s brought with her to their hideaway in the woods? Pitch perfect writing! Some bears, after all, are known to murder cubs in order to persuade the mother back into mating again.I can see why this won the PEN/Faulkner Award.