Marian Engel's Notebooks: ‘Ah, mon cahier, écoute ...’ ed. by Christl Verduyn (review)

532 LEITERS IN CANADA 1999 of the novels, though there are, after all, plenty of places for readers to go for fuller and/ or different perspectives on Morrison. A few careless errors in identifying characters also surface from time to time. Nevertheless, Matus generally does a very good job of providing both introductory information and a more sophisticated argument. This book provides a useful start for those looking to plunge into the vast ocean ofToni Morrison scholarship and those just wanting to read up a bit more on one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. (DEBORAH CLARKE) Christl Verduyri, editor. Marian Engel's Notebooks:'All, mon cahier, ecollte ..: Wilfred Laurier University Press. viii, 576. $54·95, $28,95 When Marian Engel's novel The Honeyman Festival was published in 1970, it came as a shock. No woman had yet written with such candour of the daily messiness of family life. Pregnant with her fourth child, Engel's character reflected on the compromises to her own creativity exacted by maternity. The reviewers called Engel a revolutionary writer; some even called her dangerous. In her short career, she published seven novels, two collections of fiction, and two books for children. When she died of cancer in 1985 at the age of fifty-two, Canadian literature lost a talented writer who had much more to say. . Christi Verduyn's intense engagement with Engel was made clear with her publication in 1995 of Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence and Lifelines: Marian Engel's Writings. Now, in editing Engel's notebooks, she has completed her portrait of this intelligent and complicated woman. Verduyn begins Marian Engel's Notebooks: 'Ail, mon cailier, ecoute ...' with a faSCinating polemical discussion of the issues involved in publishing a writer's private notebooks. She offers four compelling motives that guided her in editing and publishing Engel's cahiers (the word Engel preferred to journals). In the last decades, Verduyn suggests, our sense of the literary text has expanded to include the genre of life writing, and Engel's are model texts.They are historically interesting in that they offer a glimpse of the literary enterprise in Canada from the 1950S onward. This was a crucial time for Canadian writers, and in particular for women writers. They were just beginning to throw off the colonial complex that Northrop Frye had diagnosed as afrostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination. Verduyn also suggests that Engel's notebooks are a 'fascinating blueprint of the creative process' since the genesis of her novels and stories is to be found in them. Aesthetically, they are a hybrid and very satisfying text. Quoting the young scholar Elizabeth Podnieks, Verduyn remarks that the self-reflexive form of the notebook displays 'an aesthetic texture' that is of literary significance. HUMANITIES 533 Verduyn confronts the issue of the invasion of the writer's privacy head on. Engel, she asserts, assumed her notebooks would be read. 'To write, and in particular to preserve what one writes, is to invite, indeed to intend, readership.' Her selection represents about 70 per cent of the original notebooks. Wanting to make a vivid and compelling book, she excised repetitive material and fragmentary and incoherent entries. But her deletions were also determined by 'the argument of privacy for individuals associated with the subject: In particular she was thinking of Engel's children. Verduyn does a superb job of editing. Each of the forty-one notebooks is introduced with a physical description of the cahier and its contents. Information is offered about dating, necessary since Engel's disregard for chronology and dates often made the editor's task difficult. Engel wrote in several notebooks at once, cross-referenced, and reread constantly. Verduyn's footnotes are illuminating and often engaging. The book delivers on its promise. Most exciting is to watch the evolution of a writer's imagination from that of the young girl who exhorted herself at the age of sixteen to 'live creatively' and make of her life 'a work of art: to that of the mature writer. We can see how Engel's novels evolved from her life and how her life was shaped by her fiction...