Alone at last: The secret of Marian Engel’s Bear
by
A woman is sent to an island for a summer. 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. 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. “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?”