Bear Audiobook By Marian Engel cover art

Bear

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Bear

By: Marian Engel
Narrated by: Victoria Carr
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Buy for $14.40

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The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction,Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. What she discovers will change her life forever. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. Includes a reading group guide.

 Animals Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic reviews

“The best Canadian novel of all time. . . . Engel’s prose turns swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again. . . . In part for its extravagant strangeness, for the disruption it poses to [Canadian] tradition, Bear deserves to be celebrated.”
--National Post

“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.”
--Margaret Atwood

“Canada’s Lolita or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
--Globe and Mail

“Bear works as simply and mysteriously as a folktale. It is a remarkable tour de force.”
--New York Times

“A startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable.”
--Washington Post

“At once insightful and mysterious. . . . Bear is brave. We should be too.”
--Andrew Pyper

“It’s a modern Canadian fable . . . and, above all, totally readable.”
--Hazlitt Magazine

“An astounding novel, both earthy and mythical, which leads into the human self and also outward to suggest and celebrate the mystery of life itself.”
--Margaret Laurence, author of The Stone Angel

“A riveting story . . . brilliant and moving.”
– Publishers Weekly

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This is a strange story about a sad bear and a middle aged woman who is desperate to have sex with him.

I feel sorry for the bear

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i had very low expectations for this title and i feel ashamed for that. it was a delightfully well told, if not a conventional story.

weird and yet enthralling

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Wouldn’t this be a fun one to pull out for book club haha. Seriously though, I would discuss the hell outta this over a bottle of wine. I wanna talk about the symbolism the bear represents but I have no one who has read this title in my life. 10/10 weird but rich with literary gold.

Gorgeous prose and a story like no other.

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I had to reed it for school. It's supposed to be "great Canada's literature", but I dislike my professor for putting this images in my mind.
It's the boring story of a woman who takes care of an old house in an island with a bear. And her recognition of herself during her days in that place.
Victoria's voice is also kind of a soporific, very calm and slow, like trying to be seductive throughout the whole story.
I wouldn't recommend it

Slow and weird

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seriously, what in the world was this? how was this author eventually promoted to the status she was after this novel? what a pile of pretentious drivel. This man-hating, bear-screwing character deserves nothing.

wtf

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