That Just Happened!

Engel, Marian.  Bear.  McLelland and Stewart. (1976)

After five years buried like a mole amid the decaying maps and manuscripts of an historical institute, Lou is given a welcome field assignment: to catalogue a nineteenth-century library, improbably located in an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario. Eager to reconstruct the estate’s curious history, she is unprepared for her discovery that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear.

Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the estate’s historical occupants, whose fascination with bear lore becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-discovery, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature through her bizarre and healing relationship with the bear.

A daring and compelling novel, Marian Engel’s Bear won the Governor General’s Award for 1976

From the Publisher

 I was with the Publishers until the second paragraph.  I wouldn’t necessarily say that they accurately capture what the book is about.  In one word, it is about: Bestiality.  Yeah.  Lou’s relationship with the bear is a sexual one.  I understand that the author was probably going more for exploring Lou’s sexual awakening and her mental fragility as a single woman.  Perhaps, given the time, I will even stretch to say that the author was commenting on the sexual awakening happening in society.  The Seventies was definitely a time of excess, but this kind of free love may be more appropriate to pair with the mind-bending psychotics of the Sixties.   So really…I got nothing.  Reading this book was disturbing and, I felt, shocking for the sake of being shocking. 

I did a bit of research on this book and the author.  Although it is stated by many that Engel was a prolific writer, I cannot find a single thing beyond the plot summary.  What does it all mean?  What does her relationship symbolize?  Why did I read a book about a woman doing “it” with a bear?  *sigh*  The answers are not to be found.

Themes are self-discovery, relationships, sexuality.