The Forest

Georges Bugnet
Translated by David Carpenter

About the Book

"Last week I was asked … what was the finest novel of the Canadian West. I quickly thought of two deeply sincere and tragic novels, Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of Marsh and Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House. But the book I actually name gives, I believe, a deeper sounding of life in the West than either of these.… The book is M. Georges Bugnet's La Fôret … a novel of the Peace River country where the author has lived most of his adult life. Georges Bugnet, novelist, dramatist, poet, and critic, is one of the really important Canadian writers. In him an intellect and spirit of a very high order unite with a long experience of life in the wilderness; and the result has been a literary work in which the materials of the frontier have been wrought into designs of lasting beauty, and their meaning presented with an unwavering courage. His "Nipsya" in the beautiful translation of the late Constance Davis Woodrow, is known to English-speaking Canadians…. The Forest is in some ways an even finer performance. It relates the tragic struggle of a young urban Frenchman and his wife with the formidable nature of primitive Canada. The come from France with a romantic wish to pioneer beyond the end of the steel. They take up land beyond all the farms in the district, on the edge of a great lake, in the midst of a green forest…. It is a great and tragic book…. We do not have many such…." From a review by E. K. Brown in the Winnipeg Free Press.

About the Author

"Georges-Charles-Jules Bugnet, pseudonym Henri Doutremont, editor, writer, botanist (b at Chalon-sur-Saône, France 23 Feb 1879; d at St Albert, Alta 11 Jan 1981). A homesteader in Alberta from 1905, Bugnet rarely found favour in the eyes of Québec literary critics. Nevertheless, the range of his writing, as well as its religious intensity, places it among the most important work in French published in Canada in the 1930s. His work in the hybridization of roses earned him the Chevalier de l'ordre des palmes académiques in 1970.

"Bugnet was founder and president of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, as well as editor of Union. This interest in French pioneers in Alberta is reflected primarily in his celebrated novel, La Forêt (1935; tr The Forest, 1976). His knowledge of and sympathy for the Métis is developed in Nipsya (1924). After Gabrielle ROY, Bugnet may be considered the major francophone writer of the Canadian West." E.D. BLODGETT in the Canadian Encyclopedia

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