6/22/2023 0 Comments Bear by marianThe bear is a pet of the deceased estate-owner. The prospect of this wilderness existence intoxicates her – and then she discovers the bear. Lou will be there on her own, with back-up only from Homer, a mainland storekeeper who boats in supplies now and then. The family home housing the library is on a remote island in the northern bush. Then one summer she is sent off to catalogue a library bequeathed to the Institute by the descendant of a colonial family. Once a week, she and the Institute’s Director cheerlessly couple on her desk. She is a ‘mole’, a lonely, flabby thirty-something who spends her days burrowing amidst dusty files in the Institute basement. Lou, Bear’s human protagonist, is a librarian-archivist working at a Historical Institute in a large Canadian city. Perhaps the book’s ‘peculiarly Canadian’ theme (as one reviewer delicately put it) was a turn-off I regularly press copies on British friends, none of whom have admitted to reading it. A UK edition was published by Pandora Press in 1988 but it got little attention. Godine.īear, by Marian Engel, stormed the bestseller lists in Canada and the USA. Front cover of the 2003 edition of Marian Engel’s Bear, published by David R. For a country routinely described as boring, Canada displays a surprising penchant for such flashes of sublime weirdness (witness the film auteur David Cronenberg). In 1976 Canada’s awarded its premier literary prize to a novel about a sexual relationship between a woman and a bear.
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