Bear by Julia Phillips
🐻 If you’ve ever thought, reading is a little bit like religion and then you forgot for a year or ten or twenty, Julia Phillips is here to remind you.
Maybe finding the right book or author has made you think of a pilgrimage or sacred journey. For more on the topic of sacred texts, see Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores, Princeton University Press, reviewed here a while back. To have a religious experience, read Julia Phillips’ note to her reader on the subject of being stuck at the back of Bear. Then you are ready to be cracked open like a hot chestnut and actually read her book, Bear.
Sometimes we go to a hotel room by ourselves halfway across the world looking for something but we don’t find it, just a kebab. We eat the kebab, shower for the third time and wait for sleep, who doesn’t come. We put on the light and take out Bear, from the plane. “Here it comes,” as Van Morrison said, “Here comes the night.”
From whatever Siberian Orcas Island Julia Phillips sprang, I love it there. I love its sustaining earth. Earth is one of Phillips’ big things, which you know if you’ve read her book Disappearing Earth. You can feel this earlier book in Bear. Best of all, you can remember the trust Phillips establishes in her reader. This trust carries over into Bear. A book about trust, it also engenders it.
Bear may be inspired by a fairy tale but it is much more than that. If genre-defying were not already a term it could be used more meaningfully here. Don’t you wish no one ever said love, or “changed my life”? I love this genre-defying book because it changed my life. Since these words are empty and meaningless, go read the book yourself so it can happen to you. That energy you once felt for the Pacific Northwest? Phillips is here to restore it, along with your faith that fell out on the road somewhere. She’s probably not an angel and just a storyteller, but that’s what they said about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ character too, that old man with the wings.🪽