Marian Engel

A lonely woman journeys toward inner freedom and strengths and a sense of communion with all living creatures

Bear

Claustrophobic, sweaty and a touch devastating. Treats its salacious premise with a grown up’s nuance.  The eponymous bear’s indifference is really quite poggers.

pranya

The winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, Marian Engel's most famous - and most controversial - novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Eager to investigate the estate's curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. Lou's imagination is soon overtaken by the island's past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. What she discovers will change her life forever. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. Includes a reading group guide. From the Hardcover edition.

Patrick Book

What a curious little book! It says so much about loneliness, human interaction, projection, longing, and isolation in so very few pages. But it’s whole, despite its brevity.

Mat Connor

Everyone has heard of the The Great American Novel. Moby Dick. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Beloved.

Bear is The Great Canadian Woman Has Sex With a Bear on an Island in Northern Ontario (Wait What?) Novel 

That's really what happens. It's obviously a metaphor for more complex stuff, but that's literally what happens in this short novel. It might be the weirdest novel I've ever read but at least it's interesting.

I was all excited to make the joke that Marian Engel invented the Bearotica genre. I googled that term to see if anyone had ever made that joke before and um it turns out Bearotica is a thing.

Libby

Yasemin

'A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.' - Margaret Atwood

Bear

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