Around the World in 80 Books discussion

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About the Book (from the publisher)

A reclusive young boy stumbles upon his father’s diary. Filled with drawings, photos and anecdotes, the diary reveals an alpine world that his father once inhabited as a child: where tribes were fashioned by tree spirits; animals could be spoken to; fleas danced; and the moon and stars were guiding lights in darkling forests. His father’s world was alive with birdsong and hidden spirits, serene yet fleeting—but it all changed when he befriended two bears.

Bewitching and timeless, award-winning Taiwanese author Chang Ying-Tai’s The Bear Whispers to Me is a poignant forest fable about the vivid beauty of the natural world, childhood, loss and the transient nature of time.


About the Author

Chang Ying-Tai is an award-winning Taiwanese novelist and short story writer. She earned her PhD in Literature from National Taiwan University, and holds the position of Distinguished Professor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei.

Over the past decade, she has been the recipient of numerous major awards, including the China Times First Prize for Fiction and Prose; the United Daily Press First Prize for Fiction; the Central Daily News First Prize for Fiction; the Award for Literary Writing from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education; and the Lennox Robinson Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts. She has also been a finalist for the Two-Million-Yuan Award for Fiction, one of the largest monetary prizes in Asian literature.

Her works include the novels: The Bear Whispers to Me, The Zither Player of Angkor Thom, The Rose with A Thousand Faces, To All the Boys We Loved Before; and the short-story collections: My Tibetan Love, Floating Nest, and The Unstoppable Spring. In 2015, a new English-language translation of The Bear Whispers to Me was published by Balestier Press.

"The soul of the body remains, but the spirit of the mind cannot find the way home. (76)"

This novel seemed very dreamlike and slightly disconnected. If you have seen the film Big Fish (starring Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney), then you will have an idea about how this novel "feels" to me.

From the perspective of the son, his father appears to be a highly imaginative, sickly little boy who lost his voice and part of his spirit when he left the mountains he played in as a boy. Through the scrapbooks his father writes (mainly pictures with captions), the son pieces together the story of his father and the childhood from which he was never able to escape from, nor return to.

I felt as though the characters went through three phases:
-Adventurous Boy, "Cub", and silly Lotus
-Investigative Boy, "Bear", Lotus as helper, The Black Bear/Monster
-Protective Boy, "Mother Bear", Lotus as mistress/secret-keeper, Kody

There were also some odd "mentoring" strangers: "Grandpa," The Bee Man, and The Herb Man; old men who all imparted knowledge about the natural world to the Boy. Was it real? How did the boy get all this knowledge if not?

Although the Boy's story seemed rather sad (there seemed to be a few times he slipped into unconsciousness and had very vivid dreams, with his father wondering where he got his fantastical ideas) and simple Lotus' story was a bit more sad, Kody's story was the worst for me. I like to believe that the last paragraph in the book indicates that some bit of humanity remained in him. I'm wondering if there was some symbolic connection between what Kody became and the Boy's decision to wear the bear pelt to distract the mob at the end. It was also sad when the son took his father (the Boy) back to his old home and everything seemed smaller and less majestic than he remembered. It was a weirdly good book.