I Couldn’t “Bear” It
Posted in Books on 04/01/2010 08:00 am by JennEngel, 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.












