That Just Happened!

 Laurence, Margaret.  The Diviners.  McClelland & Stewart (1974).

The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel.

This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her. But in time, the aloneness that had once been forced upon her becomes a precious right – relinquished only in her overwhelming need for love. Again and again, Morag is forced to test her strength against the world – and finally achieves the life she had determined would be hers.

The Diviners has been acclaimed by many critics as the outstanding achievement of Margaret Laurence’s writing career. In Morag Gunn, Laurence has created a figure whose experience emerges as that of all dispossessed people in search of their birthright, and one who survives as an inspirational symbol of courage and endurance.

From The Publisher

Well, I can cross another one off the list of GG Award Winners and I am pretty glad I did, because this book was long.  It took me two attempts to read the whole thing, but I did start to enjoy it more from the middle of the book.  I didn’t enjoy it as much as  A Jest of God, but it was well-written.  I had forgotten that A Jest of God was part of a series, so I was unaware that this was the last in that series.  I do like to read a series in order, but these books stand alone.  There wasn’t a connective thread, except that it has to do with small town living and the people within.

The book is written from Morag’s point of view and switches between her current life and memories of her childhood.  The switches are easy to follow as they are marked with their own subtitles.  I feel a little bit like I have read this story before; small town girl wants to break away and experience big city life, but finds things are not as green on that side.  Yep, pretty sure I have read it before.  Despite this, Laurence really can write a good novel.  You can tell the quality of writing is better and the story was well thought out. 

Themes are relationships, family, self-discovery, family.  I would say this is a Pick it up if there is nothing better.

This was read toward my personal Governor General Award Winner for Fiction Challenge.

Wright, Richard B.  Clara Callan. HarperPerenniel Modern Classics (2001).

 It is the late 1930s and two sisters, Clara and Nora Callan, face the future with both hope and uncertainty.  Clara, a thirtyish schoolteacher from small-town Ontario, longs for love and adventure.  Nora, her flighty and very pretty younger sister, escapes to the excitement of New York, where she becomes a monor celbrity.  At a time when war clouds are gathering, the sisters struggle within the web of social expectation for young women…

From the Jacket

Fantastic.  It has been a while since I have been so contented while reading a book.  The storyline is interesting, the prose: lyrical, the pace: great.  All in all, a novel very deserving of the Governor General Award for Literary Fiction. 

The novel is actually a collection of letters and journal entries written between Clara, her sister Nora, and Nora’s friend Evelyn.  At first I was a little skeptical of reading a book that was just letters, but I soon realized that the letters were so interesting and well written you hardly noticed it at all.  There was never any confusion about who was writing the letter (most of it is written by Clara’s hand).

I have talked about perspective before on this blog.  Usually you can tell if the author is male or female and their characters take on that tone.  This was written from the female perspective so well that it wasn’t until the end of the novel I remembered it was written by a man.  The sentiments and feelings are so clearly female.  Also, it’s also hard to believe a man would write all those letters (even if he is the author!).

Themes in this book are relationships, love, sexuality, politics and culture.

I would say this is was definitely worthy of

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.