Less than a year after the publication of forest womanan autobiographical novel in which she explored the rural territory of her childhood in times of confinement, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette returns with river womanher fourth novel, in which she dares to dive even further into the imagination by lending the narrator part of her family heritage.
“In all that I have written, river woman, it is perhaps the novel where I allow myself the most to switch to fiction, affirms the novelist. Obviously, there is me and I drew from what makes me up, from the themes and emotions that interest me and that I encounter. If I speak to the “you” as in The leaky woman, it is to bring me closer to an “I”; there are characters we have already met, like Janine, who raised my mother, and my painter grandfather. I stay in areas that are deeply familiar to me, but the fact of being in a novel allows me to push my emotional limits, to explore in a very free way, not as if I were in a documentary. »
Continuity
“It’s a kind of continuity with forest woman and even with The leaky woman, she continues. I didn’t describe it that way at first, but I think it’s the end point of a triptych; in these three books, the central reflection that I dissect under the emotional magnifying glass is the link. What makes, in the case of river woman, that a meeting becomes essential? What makes someone suddenly unique? What makes an encounter leave an imprint? And also, what makes us stay, what makes us leave? »
Even more, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette wanted to deal head-on with a subject that still shocks some according to her: “I wanted to claim feminine desire, to be a woman who desires, who is not everything time waiting for the desire of men, which is still much written and still much studied. It takes us so much elsewhere, we should be proud of it to be able to desire, to be in love. »
The impression that the expression “feminine desire” still destabilizes today, the author holds it from the comments received on several occasions about the love scenes in The leaky woman and in forest woman.
“Still, it’s not shocking, how I write these scenes. Desiring remains somewhat taboo, especially if it is a desiring mother, who is looking for new affective landscapes. without making one statement, me, it makes me feel good to write it and maybe it will be good for others to read it. I would like young women not to wait until adulthood to stop being in the position of the desired and adopt that of the desiring. »
refuge river
It was during the winter, after the “epic” filming of white dog, based on the work of Romain Gary, which Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette felt the need to write, to find herself alone with her words. The novelist then embarked on this story of a passionate love between a woman of letters who has taken refuge on an island, far from her husband and her daughter, and a painter who seeks to reproduce the blue of the river.
“I needed to go back to the water of the river, says the filmmaker, a few days before her departure for the Hamburg International Film Festival, where white dog will be presented as an international premiere out of competition. In filming, we are in communication mode with others, while in writing, we are looking inward. Writing helped me land in a softer way. Coming out of a shoot is tough, especially a difficult one like this. So writing brings me back together. »
I needed to turn around towards the water of the river. In filming, we are in communication mode with others, while in writing, we are looking inward.
Like the narrator of river womanthe author maintains an emotional and visceral relationship with the river and cannot help but return to it when the time comes to recharge her batteries, reconnect with nature and allow herself to study reality in order to better feed her imagination. .
“This water is like no other, it has an effect on me that is really special. She is both calm and wild. In terms of identity, it really picks up on me. There is a part of the river that flows within us and we tend to forget it a bit. Me, I need to go to the river. When I run away to go write, it’s always near the river. I have lots of little alcoves where I land and that’s where I write. »
The poetry of science
Bewitching novel evoking the world of Anne Hébert, particularly the character of Olivia de la Haute Mer des Gannetsand the impressionist music of Debussy, including the piano prelude The sunken cathedral, river woman invites us to explore the waters of the river and its kelp forests which testify to their well-kept mysteries and their threatened beauty.
“My relationship with the river is emotional and poetic, but over the past year, I have been in close and frequent exchanges with researchers from UQAR, biologists who live with the river and in the river, underwater archaeologists, navigators, people who study the ice, the suffocation of the river, the movement of river species. Obviously, scientific knowledge can be really boring for some, but for me, listening to them talk, I understood that science and poetry are very, very close. »
Thanks to her new scientific knowledge, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette took the liberty of borrowing a few metaphors from river nature, such as that of the oyster which transforms a wound into a pearl and that of the starfish which sacrifices a part of herself in order to escape the man. Or that of the nuptials, that place on the river where fresh water meets salt water, like fiction meets reality in river womanwhere the love story moves gently into a chronicle of an announced ecological disaster.
“I will never do my job, whether it’s film or writing, political advocacy because I don’t feel capable of it and I’ve rarely seen books that managed to do it well, but that I live with these questions every day. For me, river woman is a story of love, passion and love breakup. That said, by camping it in front of this river that overwhelms me, I cannot ignore its reality and that reality, we are connected to it. The eroding banks are swallowed by the river, which suffocates. I don’t want to write a tragedy inside a story, but these realistic breaches are my way of being useful without being dry. »