I don’t want to spoil anything for you, or at least not more than I already have, but the thing about Bear is how trivial the actual bestial fornication is in the grander scheme of the novel - Lou is a contemporary woman, making her way in a world that wasn’t built for her. Engel’s prose turns swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again - here she is being funny as hell, describing her protagonist’s mounting frustration with her official task, and cracking at everything en vogue in ’70s literature: “She felt like some French novelist who, having discarded plot and character, was left to build an abstract structure, and was too tradition-bound to do so.”Įngle’s comic range is broader than metafictional jabs: at one point, after licking Lou to the brink of orgasm, the bear (who is never once anthropomorphized) actually walks away from her, still in the glow of passion, trailing bear farts behind him. Bear is great because of what it manages to do through language in its meagre 115 pages. The reason Bear is the greatest Canadian novel of all time is not because I, a 27-year-old woman with a piss poor sense of the boundaries between work and life, found it relatable. Article content ‘Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel’

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

We’d congratulate Engel for crafting such a profoundly relatable protagonist, in an era where work takes over more and more of our lives and the traditional markers of maturity (marriage, home ownership, pension plans, legitimate weekends) are being lost on the rocky terrain of an increasingly precarious contract-term economy. If Bear were first published today, we’d bill it as a literary account of a woman’s quarter-life crisis we’d say Lou’s journey of self-discovery is a heart-rending portrait of the difficulty of maintaining a work-life balance. What you can’t tell from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Bear is a damn good book in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.įunny and sweet, Engel’s 1976 Governor General’s Award winning (more on that later!) erotic novella follows Lou, a bookish 27-year-old woman employed by a pseudo government agency called the Historical Institute out to a remote homestead in the Northern Ontario woods, where she spends time investigating dusty old books.

Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

Bear by marian engel