![]() ![]() The 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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