The Bear Comes Home - Hardcover

Zabor, Rafi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393040372 ISBN 13: 9780393040371

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1997

Synopsis

A saxophone playing bear breaks out of a novelty act and starts a serious jazz career, which alternately lands him in jail, with a recording contract, and in love with a beautiful woman named Iris

About this title

About the Author

Rafi Zabor is a music journalist and jazz drummer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

Bewilderingly brilliant, frequently frustrating, archly hip debut about a mystically inclined, talking, alto sax-playing bear and the cruel, loving, or merely befuddled Manhattanites who ultimately help him achieve jazz satori. Taking more from Kafka than Disney, Zabor, a jazz drummer and music journalist, introduces us to the unusually gifted Bear, who is suffering the existential angst that comes from dancing and passing the hat on Manhattan's mean streets. One night Bear dons a raincoat and a dark hat, packs up his alto, and sneaks into a jazz club, where he jams with Lester Bowie and Art Blythe, who, like most human inhabitants of the cool, cynical, pearls-before-swine jazz world that Zabor knows so well, are more impressed with Bear's extraordinary sax chops than the fact that he's a bear that talks. Even Ornette Coleman is impressed, launching into a priceless speculation about the virtues of ``quadrupedal tone'' versus ``two-footed music.'' A subsequent club date, destined to become Bear's first album, ends in a police raid--evidently, animal acts, no matter how nonexploitative, require permits. So the Bear sits in jail, pining for fresh salmon while debating philosophy with a prison psychiatrist. Then jazz-world denizens join forces to spring Bear from jail, spiriting him off to Woodstock, where he can work on his album, ponder the mystical (but not physical--the eventual sex scenes are wonderfully gentle) impossibility of his love for a beautiful woman and prepare for his first tour. There are too many elliptical, navel-gazing meditations on mysticism, love, the imperfections of art--and on why the music business is so sleazy- -but, thankfully, there are also moments of satiric genius in Zabor's passionate portrait of an artist as a cool dude with fur. Hip, flip, sexy, and worldy-wise, with walk-ons by Charlie Haden and other jazz celebrities: a first novel that has the makings of a cult smash. (First serial to Musician) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A frustrated saxophonist crashes a New York City nightclub gig, beginning a reputation as a much-talked-about, mysterious figure in the jazz world. Along the way, he goes through the rigors of touring, garners a recording contract, does time in prison, and wins the love of a good woman. Pretty standard fare? Wait?factor in that our hero is a real live walking and talking bear. Nothing wrong with that, but unlike William Kotzwinkle's recent The Bear Went Over the Mountain (LJ 6/1/96), which plays the "bear about town" scenario for laughs, first novelist Zabor asks us to take the bear's odyssey fairly seriously, expecting us to accept the bear in these situations as easily as the book's characters do. This is a shame, because Zabor's scenes of musical life are vivid and knowledgeable, and his dialog is uniformly excellent; adding that talking bear seems gimmicky and at odds with the effective reality of the work. With all this strong material, one wonders why the main character is a bear. Perhaps to sell more books? For larger fiction collections.
-?Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393040372
• ISBN 13: 9780393040371
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480