Bear (Oso) (1976)
Marian Engel (1933-1985)
Translated into Spanish from the original English by Magdalena Palmer
171 pagesBritish actress Beatrice Stella Tanner Campbell is famously reported to have said: “It doesn’t make any difference what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” Such broad equanimity was apparently not displayed by many readers of Marian Engel’s novel Bear: the notes on the back of the edition I read describe it as “being considered one of the best (and most controversial) novels of Canadian literature.” And, in fact, Bear is not for the easily offended.
The main character, Lou, works as an archivist at a Historical Institute in Toronto. Hidden away in a basement office, she sits quite literally buried in her work: piles of papers, books and other objects sent to the institute by people who felt there might value in them, and so couldn’t bring themselves to through away. Lou sorts through all these items, evaluating their usefulness as historical artifacts, though much of it seems to her to suspiciously resemble the detritus of daily life.As the story opens, Toronto is in the grips of one of its long winters, a time when Lou “lives like a mole,” (9) simply passing from her apartment to her office and back. She seems to have little interest in engaging with anything beyond her home and work, preferring to remain comfortably sequestered in the constrained and muted world she has created for herself.
Then one day the her director stops by her office to say that a wealthy heiress has bequeathed a property to the institute, a house on a tiny isolated island in the northernmost waters of Lake Huron. The property had been in the heiress’ family for several generations, going back to Canada’s early history, and the director wants Lou to visit the house and catalog its contents, in the hopes of finding rare historical documents about the period of the country’s pioneers. The trip presents an opportunity for Lou to escape her underground lair and the boring sameness of the piles of archives she sifts through daily. As winter turns to spring, she packs her bags and travels north to visit the exotic acquisition.
Arriving on the island with the help of a man who owns a store at a nearby marina, and who has been charged with keeping an eye on the property, Lou is thrilled to discover a house with a distinctive architecture and a beautiful collection of furniture, as well as shelves and shelves of books and papers gathered by the generations of the family who have lived there. There is no electricity or running water however, and certainly no phone connection either (the story being written in the 1970’s, well before cell phones), so Lou is all but camping out --- albeit in a lovely house and location --- her only connection to the outside world a boat she can take to the marina on the mainland.
The island does contain one other distinctive feature: the bear of the title, chained to a stake, with a shed-like structure as a home. Lou learns from the caretaker that the bear has been on the island for decades, and that the heiress had treated it as a kind of pet.
Not surprisingly, Lou is initially wary of the bear. But she needs to feed it, and can’t help but observe its behavior from the house. Gradually her isolation on the island, and her growing comfort in the bear’s presence, lead her to begin to see it less as a wild animal, and ever more as a companion.
As spring turns into summer, Lou’s relationship with the bear transforms from caring for it as a docile, simple-minded pet, into viewing it as deeply inscrutable, almost mystically empathic confidant. In the presence of the bear she begins to open up to herself about her own deep-seated anxieties about her life, and her desire for direction and meaning. Given the depth of her spiritual pain and hunger, and, in the isolation of their life together on the island, Lou’s feelings for the bear quickly come to overpower her, becoming an irresistible attraction. As her feelings and actions become ever more intense and unpredictable, Lou struggles to make sense of what she is experiencing, and to find a way through it to solid ground.
Approaching Engel’s novel as a straight-forward narrative leaves little room for viewing it as anything other than a kind of crass bit of spectacle. And one can imagine that such a view led to the apparent controversy it generated. But such a view would be a mistake. A more sympathetic reading of the tale she has constructed is as a kind of allegory on the ability to find redemption and experience rejuvenation in nature, while acknowledging the danger of sinking so deeply into it that we can begin to lose our humanity, our sense of perspective about ourselves and our lives.
There is no question that the events and language of Engel’s erotically charged novel are graphic and shocking. But a reader able to open their mind to the intensity and depth of connection that Lou experiences can come away deeply affected by the story.
Other reviews / information:
Read a quote from the book here.
The translation from the Spanish of that quote, and the one used in the review, are mine.
I was given the book in Spanish, though the original was written in English. The translation by Magdalena Palmer seems fairly literal, with English expressions translated directly into Spanish as opposed to finding their Spanish equivalent. This surely made it easier to read for me to read, as a native English speaker, but it also seemed appropriate, because the setting --- the nature and wilds of Northern Canada --- play such a fundamental role in the story, and the language is such a critical part of that place.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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