The Bear Comes Home: A Novel [Paperback]

Rafi Zabor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1998

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: "A hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity . . . that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled."—Publishers Weekly

The hero of this sensational first novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz. "Poignant and touching moments combine with hilarious descriptions of the bear's struggle in a story that anyone — whether familiar with jazz or not — will find compelling and entertaining."—David Amram, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Zabor's knack for detail makes the absurd premise believable . . . and neatly turns the weighty subject — the painful and ungainly growth of an artist — into a comic gem."—The New Yorker  "In fluent, witty prose Zabor conveys with remarkable vividness the texture of group improvisation. . . . It swings."—A. O. Scott, New York Newsday "Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. Get the Bear."—David Nicholson, Washington Post  "Zabor . . . conveys the mingled joy and terror of musical improvisation. He also displays a mean wit."—New York Times Book Review One of the Los Angeles Times Book Review's 100 best books of 1997 Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Rafi Zabor's PEN-Faulkner Award-winning novel opens, the Bear shuffles and jigs with a chain through his nose, rolling in the gutter, letting his partner wrestle him to the ground for the crowd's enjoyment. But as soon becomes clear, this is no ordinary dancing bear. "I mean, dance is all right, even street dance. It's the poetry of the body, flesh aspiring to grace or inviting the spirit in to visit," he muses, but before all else, the Bear's heart belongs to jazz. This is, in fact, one alto-sax-playing, Shakespeare-allusion-dropping, mystically inclined Bear, and he's finally fed up with passing the hat. One night he sneaks out to a jazz club and joins a jam session. On the strength of the next day's write-up in the Village Voice, the Bear begins to play around town and hobnob with some of jazz's real-life greats. A live album, a police raid, a jailbreak, a cross-country tour, and no small amount of fame later, Bear finds himself in love with a human woman--and staring down the greatest improbability of all.

Admittedly, a novel about a talking, sax-blowing bear may not initially seem everyone's cup of tea, but Zabor's Bear is no cuddly anthropomorph: "I may be wearing a hat and a raincoat, thought the Bear, but no one's gonna mistake me for Paddington." He lives, he suffers, he loves--in fact, the love scenes come as something of a shock, and not just for the usual interspecies reasons. Who knew that the description of a bear's reproductive mechanisms could be so tender or so unabashedly erotic? Most of all, though, The Bear Comes Home evokes the world of improvisational jazz with consummate skill; Zabor, a longtime jazz journalist and drummer, writes about music with a passion and inspiration seldom found on the printed page. A wistful fable about an artist's coming of age, a brilliantly satiric send-up of the music business and jazz criticism, The Bear Comes Home is a debut much like that of the Bear himself: transcendent, unexpected, wise.

--Mary Park --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039331863X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393318630
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,753 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zabor writes like the Bear plays: pure fluid jazz., October 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bear Comes Home (Hardcover)

Rafi Zabor takes us on two magical journeys without us even knowing it. The first is the material world in which the bear lives in, complete with all his struggles and triumphs. The other is the world inside Bears head. Zabor writes the two so seamlessly together that you never notice where you are at the time. The flow of the narrative resembles that of a jazz solo: always testing new borders and limits but never breaking our attention span. Zabor goes off on character thought tangents with the greatest of ease, painting a delicate picture of each character. One memorable example of this is the Bear's romp through the woods midway through the book. He returns to the woods to reflect on past events. The author so ingeniously weaves the details of the physical environment with what the Bear is thinking at the moment and why. This is a beautifully crafted book that never ceases to lose our imagination in its musical flow, like honey on the brain.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars realistic - and magical, July 24, 1999

By 

Christian E. Doering "tiger_fish" (Stewarts Point, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Bear Comes Home (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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for musicians or anyone musically inclined., July 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bear Comes Home (Hardcover)

Every musician or anyone who believes they have a special harmony with music should read this humorous, insightful and moving book.

The author does a good job of digging deep into the higher meanings of music and life, but knows when to pull in the reins at the right moment (Isn't that right, Bucky?) And anyone who can write a book that holds James Garner's Rockford Files, Thelonious Monk and great German philosophers in equal regard can't be all that bad.

I think this is mentioned on the back cover, but it bears repeating: Like a good solo, the author throws in every lick he knows and avoids cliche's.

One of my favourite images of the book is the bear teaching a "bird" in the woods Monk's "Well You Needn't." It had its blatent and hidden messages, but, when at the end of the book the "bird" returns to haunt the bear with the half learned tune ("Need - n't") and the bear replies, "Well, at least it isn't 'Nevermore'," we smile. It is like throwing "Here Comes the Sun" in the middle of a solo during "Summertime". It is immediately recognizable and appreciated. We all are in on the joke.

Although some of the Monk and jazz analysis went over my head, I found the book enjoyable from start to finish. The only exception being the sex scene between the bear and his human girlfriend in graphic detail. They were two of the hardest pages to get through and I'm still wondering why the author felt he had to include it in the book. Perhaps it was to show the bear not as this mystical musical being, but something more normal, more flesh and blood.

Read this book, pass it on or buy it as a present for the musician in your life (they'll love you for it). However, be prepared for the perplexed looks and stares when you start describing this "book about a saxophone playing bear.... No it's not a children's book..."

TSM