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.

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The bear by marian engel