The erotic adventures of a librarian and a grizzly bear
Margaret Atwood called Marian Engel's 1976 novel Bear 'strange and wonderful'. Now this slim, sexy masterpiece is finally back in print
A grizzly bear in the Yukon
Credit: Jef Wodniack
“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance,” proclaimed Margaret Atwood of her fellow Canadian Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear. To describe the plot of this slim, sexy masterpiece – now finally back in print – is inevitably to find oneself caught up in its more salacious details. Lou, a lonely librarian sent out into the wilderness, reacquaints herself with the pleasures of the flesh by means of an intimate relationship with a grizzly. But, as Atwood intimates, Engel’s masterstroke is to make her heroine’s earthy, erotic awakening feel both wonderfully and subversively celebratory, and entirely natural.