Bear by Marian Engel
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am now prepared for the customer/patron question: “do y’all have any books where a bear goes down on a lady??” yes. yes i do. but that’s pretty reductive, even though the book is only 167 pages long.
it is on my “icky-sex” shelf only because that is my catch-all shelf for incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality (guess which one this book has! the bear turns out to actually be her brother!! oh, taboo!!) no, but, i’m not censuring the way she writes the sex scenes by calling them icky, is the point. she writes a sex scene better than stephen king, and better than most of the romance novels i had to read for school.
she writes better than a lot of authors in general:
“Yet, when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows, when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that already had a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast”.
such marvelous yearning! and shame! such a wonderfully long sentence! so even if, at its core, it is a novel about a woman’s love for a bear, and the fulfillment she finds from their union, there is still some killer writing in here, because the canadians find it very difficult to write poorly. come for the animal sex scenes, stay for the commentary on loneliness and communication.
i have very little else to say about this book because it is so short. it is lovely writing, and while the character isn’t someone you are going to fall in love with, she is at least not ever boring. to fill our time together, here is a series of images of my earliest crushes, which is relevant because some of them are not human. enjoy!
also – the comments in this thread: http://imgur.com/gallery/uf3YE are killing me. ded.
