This extraordinary slim book, published in 1976, marked an important shift in the Canlit landscape as the place where female characters freed themselves from their dependence on male characters for growth and redemption. Lou is a librarian’s librarian, a cataloguer of obscure Canadiana who works like ‘a mole’ at ‘the Institute.’ When an eccentric who owns an island with a house filled with books bequests it to the Institute, she is seconded to catalogue what’s there. It’s a welcome assignment for this repressed and depressed young woman, who arrives on the island with a motherlode of self-knowledge to acquire. Besides the books in the large and strangely shaped (octagonal) house, the island comes with an inhabitant: a bear, the strange pet of the former inhabitant.The poor creature lives in the dark of his log cabin house behind the main house, chained to a post, and eats kibble that she is charged with feeding him daily. His life could not resemble his wild ancestors’ less than this. Lou is his mirror, working in a basement and chained to her repressed existence; seeing him in that state, she feels sympathy and curiosity. Slowly they become friends and the bear is allowed into the house and upstairs into the glorious glassed in library of the second floor. Here she catalogues the collection and finds herself among the books and the 13 slips of paper about bear lore that the colonel has left inside books like secret messages for her to find.Here is also the place that she comes to a sexual awakening with the bear’s tongue as lover. These passages are explicit and considered pornographic by some when the book came out, but they are clearly metaphoric: the wild in the bear brings out her own natural state, and she is freed as he is. They are complements and mirror images of each other.Homer is the local man who helps Lou with practical things, and while helping her carry heavy trunks from the basement, intimates that she owes him sex. She rebuffs him, angry at the suggestion, but later goes to him on her own terms. This book is in many ways a book of its time, written at the height of the feminist movement. Engel writes with forthright plainness about sex (she uses words like fucking and cunt), stripping away any veneer of gentility that might have remained.There are interesting touches here, mentioned in Aritha Van Herk’s afterward: the house is a ‘Fowler’ design, meant to mimic the shape of the brain, and the upper (glassed) portion is a representation of the intellect.As summer draws to a close and Lou must face the reality that the bear cannot be her lover (though she tried), she has been transformed, not only physically but emotionally. She leaves the island without the bear, of course, because he has become part of her. tl;dr:"Canadian classic," apparently. Not a totally unbearable read. Some good passages. Not for erotica fans. Grizzly prose (neverending, good GOD). My interest was piqued when a publishing house's twitter feed shared a new cover design for this "Canadian classic," featuring a woman's back marked by a bear claw scratch. It looked aggressive and raw and sexy. I was intrigued.I read it again. "Canadian classic?" Where the hell had I been, locked away in the various libraries I've shelved and built and recommended? I investigated the author's Wiki page... "a tale of erotic love between a librarian and a bear."How had I never heard of this book?!After a quick search I discovered that my current workplace (academic library) owned a copy, so I skipped among the shelves and signed it out. I shared my puzzling discovery over twitter, and a colleague cheerfully responded: she had been hoarding a copy away in her cubicle and I reminded her of it.We agreed to read Bear over a weekend and livetweet our responses. The results were pretty hilarious.You can find our Bear remarks at #CdnBearLuv on twitter. My colleague's remarks are infinitely more funny than my own. In a nutshell, I found Bear to be more than a little pretentious and definitely not sexy enough. There are some really beautiful passages; Engel's descriptions of the protagonist's rural surroundings are evocative and not overdone. Almost everything else is.The protagonist, a "mole-y" librarian/archivist from Toronto, is more than a little shortsighted and self-absorbed. She hates everything: poor people, lack of "sophisticated taste" in northern Ontario, men (especially men!), rare books, working in a basement, "fishwives" and "fishwidows," and especially, ESPECIALLY, herself. Entire sections are about her moping about the island feeling sorry for herself after the bear "ignores" her (because he's a bear) or she feels inadequate to the rural property's former occupants (and she should as the former occupant was a badass). Bear was written in 1975-6 and so reflects the cultural context of that time (I'm guessing. I wasn't alive then). There is lots of second-wave feminism here, and plenty of racist and classist tropes about Aboriginals and the rural poor: drunks, uneducated, deserve our pity. That is contained mostly in the first half, save a delightfully brief passage where the protagonist mentally rips a rural wife a new one because her husband is unfaithful (and her poor uneducated manners must have made him be that way!). I'm glad I read it just to say I've read it, and at 141 pages it didn't ask for a huge chunk of time to do so.
What do You think about Bär (2005)?
I am still pondering this one,dark, sexy, odd, enlightening. It is a lot to think about.
—Kwallin825
