pinch your conscience
Bear, 1976, is 8 x 5.25 x 0.5 inches & 167 combustible pages.
Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may subscribe now:
Marian Engel’s 1976 book Bear is an eruption. It dares you right away, first to be bored (an archivist pokes around a long-dead Canadian military leader’s estate) and then to be scandalized (she fucks a bear).
It doesn’t want to you to be either, I think. To each their own reaction, of course, but Bear’s ability to neither bore nor scandalize only reflects this wild, compact book’s singular feral enchantment.
The protagonist in Bear is concerned with ethics but the book doesn’t particularly seem to be. This makes Bear so confident that it seems to exist in a world with not only different rules, but a slightly different gravity.
Bear was recommended by pal (& New Waves author!) Kevin Nguyen for its weirdness and slimness. I think Bear’s peculiarity is contingent on its brevity. It has a riddle, Sphinx-y quality that doesn’t want to explain too much but it wants to linger long after its done talking to you. It knows something you don’t and it relishes dangling that in front of you. It knows exactly when you might squirm under the weight of figuring everything out.
Bear is a rare species, a book that’s romantic about nature without being wholesome. Bear takes place on a remote island and it makes you very envious about it. I must be there, I think, when I read a line about a marshy landscape “having its own orgasms of summer weather.” Bear is horny for nature. It’s also rigorous about interacting with nature on nature’s terms. Nature can be punky, disinterested, ravenous, fickle.
Bear shows people exposed to extreme wilderness who become desperate for validation from this wilderness. They see the way they’ve previously ordered their lives as irrelevant, so they look nature in the face and ask it to affirm their bravery or their impulses or their ability to match nature’s intensity with their own. They’re never going to get that affirmation, but they do surprise themselves when that’s all they want.