Bear by marian engel pages5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() She’ll want to mind herself around it, too. He does know, though, that the bear is not a pet. The librarian asks, Why a bear? Heraldic emblem? Totem? Symbol of the family’s domination over the land? The man doesn’t know. ![]() There has always, it seems, been a bear on the island, insisted upon by all its owners, from the Colonel who first settled here through a line of subsequent Colonels, the last of which, in reluctant obedience to the family will stating the estate should pass to whichever son became a Colonel – a decree made by a man apparently unable to conceive of a generation without male issue – was a woman named Colonel. “Did anyone tell you,” asks the man who brings her to the island in a snarling motorboat just before he roars back up the river to the closest thing that passes for a town, “about the bear?” The house boasts a library and the woman, who is a librarian, an archivist really, a historian of this territory, a place often taken to have no history at all, is meant to catalogue it. The island holds little more than a house, although admittedly a big one for this remote territory, and strangely shaped too, with eight sides and no real corners, two levels, many windows – ridiculous anywhere but especially here, where you need a fire most of the year. ![]() “ A bizarre but strangely uplifting book about a woman’s quest for freedom… the perfect escapist yet intellectual read.” The TimesĪ woman is sent to an island for a summer. ![]()
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