FOREST

This poignant novel, originally published in French in 1935, is a lyrical evocation of the beauty, the harshness, and the tragedy of pioneering life. Based on the author's own experience of homesteading in northern Alberta at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel tells the story of a young couple from France, who come to the West filled with naive optimism and romantic hope. Like Adam and Eve they end up being driven from their garden of paradise into a world of death and defeat. Georges Bugnet is a writer for whom nature is a mystical wonder filled with immense grandeur and equally immense destruction. He is conscious of humanity's need for humility in the face of that power. The translation by David Carpenter captures the richness of Bugnet's descriptive power of nature and its endearing quality: "At the edge of the water, frogs made a deafening chorus, like the shrill pealing of innumerable bells. Lustrous blackbirds, as elegant as little ravens, some even adorned with vivid scarlet epaulettes, fluttered round them, then sat on the pliant stalks of the young rushes, clucking with a liquid sweetness. To the left, at the edge of the woods, a crow clarioned its three notes, at once urgent and monotonous." The Forest is a novel that returns the reader to a world bursting the natural and filled with the sadness of those unable to subdue it. Even though the day of the agrarian pioneer is long gone, readers will be enthralled and disquieted by Bugnet's sensibility. The genuine spirit of that time remains in his work, challenging and engaging. - George Melnyk, author of the Literary History of Alberta.