Bear

By: Marian Engel

Narrated by: Victoria Carr

Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

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 19th-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 book group guide.

©1976 Marian Engel (P)2021 McClelland & Stewart

Critic reviews

“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.” (Margaret Atwood)

“A startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable.” (Washington Post)

“The best Canadian novel of all time.... Engel’s prose turns swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again.... In part for its extravagant strangeness, for the disruption it poses to [Canadian] tradition, Bear deserves to be celebrated.” (National Post)

I feel sorry for the bear

This is a strange story about a sad bear and a middle aged woman who is desperate to have sex with him.

weird and yet enthralling

i had very low expectations for this title and i feel ashamed for that. it was a delightfully well told, if not a conventional story.

Gorgeous prose and a story like no other.

Wouldn’t this be a fun one to pull out for book club haha. Seriously though, I would discuss the hell outta this over a bottle of wine. I wanna talk about the symbolism the bear represents but I have no one who has read this title in my life. 10/10 weird but rich with literary gold.

Slow and weird

I had to reed it for school. It's supposed to be "great Canada's literature", but I dislike my professor for putting this images in my mind.
It's the boring story of a woman who takes care of an old house in an island with a bear. And her recognition of herself during her days in that place.
Victoria's voice is also kind of a soporific, very calm and slow, like trying to be seductive throughout the whole story.
I wouldn't recommend it

wtf

seriously, what in the world was this? how was this author eventually promoted to the status she was after this novel? what a pile of pretentious drivel. This man-hating, bear-screwing character deserves nothing.