![]() ![]() Now, if my happiness came down to my ability to shit on command next to a bear’s shed, I am afraid that I would live out the rest of my days in torment. And Lou thinks, why not? Set two smells next to each other like twin beds. Shit with the bear every morning and he’ll like you, Lucy says. ![]() I went to the mission school.’ She took care of the bear before Lou came and she’ll take care of him again when Lou is gone. Lucy is the century: ‘I am one hundred years old. ‘Shit with the bear,’ the old Cree woman Lucy Leroy advises Lou. ‘And it would not be, if it always lived at the end of that chain.’ ‘It was not a handsome beast,’ she thinks. #Serial stories lady swings baby full#Alone and unobserved on the island, she is given a bit more slack: it’s enough that she is free to walk outside to visit her charge, bring it its ration of kibble, look it full in the face. In her previous life, it allowed her to have sex with the Director of the Institute on his desk, after first clearing away the more fragile maps and genealogies that covered it. It allows her to roam as far as the kitchen to make coffee, upstairs to the library to read, index and catalogue, to the fireside to drink whisky. As keeper of the house, as investigator of its long line of owners, it will also be her duty to care for this creature. Homer Campbell, who runs the general store upriver and sells limp carrots to the locals, tells Lou there has always been one on the estate. And behind the octagon – monument to human whimsy, to the persistence of the personality in the wilderness – is a chained-up bear: half-size, scraggly and dull in the eyes, kept alive on dog food. It has exactly as much plot as I like: Lou, a librarian suffering a romantic drought, goes to spend the summer in an octagonal house on an island, where she will catalogue the library of one Colonel Cary, imposing ‘numerical order on a structure devised internally and personally by a mind her numbers would teach her to discover’. Is it a metaphor for our relationship to nature? Fuck off. Is Bear one of those 1970s books about growing out your armpit hair? Kind of, but not only. There is also something timeless to be written. Jokes about never-to-be-seen footage, enjoinments to hear every sentence in Werner Herzog’s voice. 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. 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. There is a modern essay to be written about this work. 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. Her tits are perfect, like two drawers of a card catalogue. 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. ![]()
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