Marian Engel grew up in Galt, Sarnia and Hamilton, Ontario. An Officer of the Order of Canada, Marian Engel was a widely known and respected writer, particularly because of her internationally acclaimed, Governor General's Award–winning novel Bear (1976). To order Finding Freedom in the Lost Kitchen, Bear or A Hundred Million Years and a Day, go to Engel (née Passmore), OC, writer (born in Toronto, ON died 16 February 1985 in Toronto, ON). It’s a tense exploration of obsession and camaraderie, made more arresting still by the contrast between its slender form and the epic nature of its backdrop. Three other men join him on the journey, and with winter nearing and conditions toughening, Stan finds himself retreating into his personal past. Decades later, when he learns of a huge dinosaur fossil supposedly trapped in an Alpine glacier, that same feeling – and a good deal of hubris – steels him to embark on a dicey quest to claim it.
The thrill propels him into a career as a palaeontology professor. Jean-Baptiste Andrea (translated by Sam Taylor )Īged six, Stan discovered his first fossil: a trilobite, 300m years old. This droll, sensual tale is as strange and powerful as myth. She eats with the bear, swims with the bear, and – well, does rather more besides with him. Everything changes with a summer posting to an island estate, whose library she’s to catalogue.
She lives “like a mole, buried deep in her office”, her loneliness barely relieved by tepid sex with her boss. Freshly reissued, its shrewd insights into female desire feel no less relevant, while its appreciation of the pleasures – and perils – of solitude, and of the vast consolations of nature, seem only more compelling. Bearīack in the 1970s, Canadian novelist Marian Engel’s Bear was hailed as a feminist classic in the making. It’s all detailed in her memoir, a determined, engaging foray into narrative nonfiction whose grit is balanced by homely, transporting delights, such as fried chicken and vanilla ice-cream cones. Cooking would prove to be her salvation, ultimately leading to a restaurant of her own that’s put Freedom on the foodie map – but not before she’d weathered a toxic marriage, a prescription-pill addiction and a long battle to regain custody of her son. She had her sights set on escape, but returned to work in the kitchen of her father’s diner after becoming pregnant a year into her medicine degree. Growing up, Erin French’s hometown of Freedom, Maine, was the kind of place you passed through on your way to somewhere bigger.
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