The librarian thinks about bear more and more. Somewhere along the way the bear has become bear ‘it’ has become ‘he’.” He sprawls by the fire of an evening, more majestic than any rug, while she reads and runs her feet through his pelt. So many surprising facts.īefore long bear has the run of the house. The bear’s gait is plantigrade, its teeth tuberculated, its stature large. Kamchatkans, she learns, use the sharpened shoulder blade of the bear as a scythe. Each offers a fact about bears: their classification, their anatomy, their habits, their role in myths. Taking stock of the library, flipping through books that haven’t been off the shelf in years, she is surprised by slips of paper that flutter from between the pages.
Although she is not fond of animals, she can’t let the bear live like this, and the animal’s hold over her (part fear, part desire) only grows when something she is fond of, or at least knows her way about, whets her interest. The bear, chained in a byre, is smaller than she expected, shrunk into itself, fur matted, eyes dull. Expectations about how women – and bears – should behave. She must heed expectations, as powerful here as in the city she has left behind, more powerful, actually, because the artificiality of those rules is so clear here, in the middle of nowhere. She’ll want to mind herself around it, too. He does know, though, that the bear is not a pet. The librarian asks, Why a bear? Heraldic emblem? Totem? Symbol of the family’s domination over the land? The man doesn’t know. There has always, it seems, been a bear on the island, insisted upon by all its owners, from the Colonel who first settled here through a line of subsequent Colonels, the last of which, in reluctant obedience to the family will stating the estate should pass to whichever son became a Colonel – a decree made by a man apparently unable to conceive of a generation without male issue – was a woman named Colonel. “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?” 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. 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.
“ A bizarre but strangely uplifting book about a woman’s quest for freedom… the perfect escapist yet intellectual read.” The TimesĪ woman is sent to an island for a summer.
0 kommentar(er)
