Quotes by Marian Engel

 

Marian Engel 

QUOTES

by Marian Engel

Happiness is a fragile thing, and alcohol, as I know from the house I grew up in, is dangerous to it.

***

There is a difference between art and life and that difference is readability.

***

Remember that it is not enough to have everything around you beautiful, remember that there must also be change and flux, because it is through change that we pretend that we can make decisions, and keep our pride, and go on pretending that both change and choice exist.

***

There's a kind of virgin one only becomes with difficulty.

Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

 

Marian Engel's Bear, reviewed: The best Canadian novel of all time

What you can’t tell from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Marian Engels's Bear is a damn good book; in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.

Emily M. Keeler

Published Dec 08, 2014

Last Updated Mar 30, 2015

Canadiana is a funny and ridiculous thing — maple syrup tins, wooden hockey sticks, Mountie hats, golden-era NFB and CBC logos developed in the socialist ’70s, when the national dream was still so vivid; while Americans have apple pie, we have … I don’t know, roll up the rim? Ours is not a cosmopolitan nostalgia.

Pull off my head by Patricia Lockwood

 

Vol. 43 No. 16 · 12 August 2021

Pull off my head

Patricia Lockwood

Bear 
by  Marian Engel.
Daunt, 176 pp., £9.99, April 2021, 978 1 911547 94 5

The​ old cover was better. I am talking about the notorious mass market paperback of Marian Engel’s 1976 masterpiece, where the body of a softcore librarian is completely laid open to us, surrounded by flowing silk. Her tits are perfect, like two drawers of a card catalogue. The bear of the title looms over her shoulders, a Muppet designed to be sexual, smiling inside the dark cavern of his face and presumably doing her from behind. There is a modern essay to be written about this work. It involves the aforementioned cover art, 1970s plaid shirt feminism, the rediscovery of this book every two years by roving groups of content foragers, who must live on the phallic morels they find in the woods. It perhaps contains a tie-in with The Revenant (2015), and an anecdote about the time your mother saw it in the cinema by mistake and texted: ‘The bear did not rape Leo as was reported.’ It perhaps contains a reference to the tame Instagram bear Stepan, whose duty it has somehow become to sensually embrace a variety of hot Russian models in fields. Jokes about never-to-be-seen footage, enjoinments to hear every sentence in Werner Herzog’s voice. All this is there for the taking. There is also something timeless to be written.

Bear by Marian Engel review

Hailed as an erotic masterpiece when it was first published in the 1970s, this Canadian feminist tale, published in the UK for the first time, about a woman having sex with a bear in the wilds of northern Ontario, is a completely nutty but oddly beguiling fantasy, says Katie Law

Alone at last: The secret of Marian Engel’s Bear

by DORIAN STUBER

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?”