Dylan’s Reviews > Bear > Status Update

"The next day she was restless, guilty. She had broken a taboo. [...] She had gone too far." Excuse me, ma'am, but you were already too far, like, quite some time ago. Maybe when you spread honey on yourself for the bear. Or maybe when you watched the bear take a dump. Or maybe when you took a dump beside the bear in some strange act of submission or solidarity or connectivity. Regardless, you were already too far.

"She put honey on herself and whispered to him, but once the honey was gone he wandered off, farting and too soon satisfied." This, I think, is the passage in which the bear is depicted most anthropomorphically - it acts like a man, doesn't it?

I was not expecting to see the following sentences in the same book, let alone less than a page apart: (1) "She cradled his big, furry, asymmetrical balls in her hands [...]," and (2) "What she dislike in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none." Engel can obviously write well - so why did she write that first sentence?

Going back and forth between quoting the final paragraph on this page - not because it's 'too much' (whatever that means), but because I don't want to take away the joy of reading this from others. That being said, the bear is quite adept with its tongue. Boys, ✍️.

The oddest thing (apart, perhaps, from the bear) is that the prose is actually quite impressive: "Oh, she was lonely, inconsolably lonely; it was years since she had had human contact. She had always been bad at finding it. It was as if men knew that her soul was gangrenous."

Just in case you had any doubts, the bear is described as "indubitably male" on page 23, ladies. 😏

"As soon as [the bear] got [to the yard], he crouched and made a great turd that steamed in the morning chill. She watched his face as his bowels moved." Ah, literature.

Also: One of the characters is named Joe King. Are they going to be the comic relief?

So, the strangest thing is that this family just kept a bear and everyone was just like, "Yeah, they keep a bear." This would never happen in the city.

It feels very much like Victorian Gothic literature - and I love it. Also very Canada.