Lou locks the door on her whole past and leaves on ""a brilliant night, all star-shine, and overhead the Great Bear and his thirty-seven thousand virgins kept her company."" A special book which persuades and reaches the reader in many ways-a timeless book written with a cool, classic touch.
At the end of the summer they will go their separate ways. But he has virtues along with legendary associations-the bear was believed to have ""the strength of ten men, and the sense of twelve."" Lou takes him off his chain and then enters into an at first friendly, later erotic (bear licks her all over even if he doesn't respond until the close) community with this tender, wise, gentle, undemanding, lumbering animal who proves to be so lovable.
She is to research its books and belongings which include a bear, on a chain-a rather ugly bear with small eyes and a randy scent. Now he sends her to a lonely island further north where the Institute has inherited an estate. She has no personal contacts except for on-the-desk carnal congress with its Director once a week. Lou is a hibernator by nature, commuting between her apartment and the Institute where she does research. Within its 150 pages, it encloses strong feminist protest against the domestication of of woman, interior evidence of the personal increment rather than impoverishment of solitude, and-in case you startle easily-a passionate relationship between a woman and an animal which is wholly believable and unobjectionable. Much can be made of it on several plateaus of time and existence and reality, from mythic to very modern, primal to civilized. The novel has retained its power to shock, disturb, and move readers today.Much has been made of this book-it's sponsored by all the right people in Canada where it's set-Margaret Laurence, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Atwood. This novel by award-winning author Marian Engel works within the logic of a fever dream as the young woman comes to an even greater, and unexpected, understanding of herself.īear was first published in 1976 and won the Canadian Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. She sinks her fingers into the bear's fur-and soon realizes her darkest desire is for this large, powerful animal to be her lover.īut there's more to the story than the price to be paid for forbidden passion. Fascinated, Lou brings the bear into the house and slowly gains the animal's trust. Bear is as strong as myth and yet, like myth, it comes to us through the. In a cabin on the island, she discovers the colonel had a secret as well. It is futile in precis or paraphrase to attempt to capture the parsuasive power of Marian Engel's fiction. Lou, a shy and secretive young librarian is called to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of the recently deceased Colonel Cary. "A quietly sensual, feminist story."- The New Yorker This is the story of a 27-year-old, lonely, woman who, alone on an island, who discovers an obsessive passion-one that breaks an ancient taboo and that could very well become deadly.
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