The desiring woman did not have her place until very late in literature, where the role of object of desire was much preferred to her. Probably because its power is scary, says Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, who does not hide her intentions from the first pages: river woman will be a book on the burning of the body, his own, whose movements we will follow like a tide.
Posted yesterday at 4:30 p.m.
“I want to go to excess and make a revolution out of it. To be desirous as to be intelligent, as to be gentle, as to be reckless. To be desirous as a character trait. »
This aspect was already somewhat present in forest woman, released just over a year ago. But it becomes the heart of river woman, in which she recounts an overwhelming extramarital passion with a painter she met during a solitary stay on the banks of the river. To sum up the affair in this way seems banal, but that is counting without the Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette way, the short and limpid sentences, the poetry that runs between the lines, the story told in fragments, the links with the past, the passages between the very intimate and the infinitely large. She talks about the heritage and history of art, love and old age – a very moving passage with her aunt Janine -, meets characters larger than life, and always keeps this peripheral vision that makes her stories have multiple layers that are lifted as you go.
The author, filmmaker and playwright, who used to be at the heart of her books since The leaky woman, which was devoted to her maternal grandmother Suzanne Meloche, blurs the cards here with an alter ego whose parameters she has changed, probably out of modesty. But it’s her voice that we hear all the same, which creates a kind of discrepancy that we didn’t feel in her other works, accentuated by the narration that goes from I to you when she talks about her lover… and what they do together.
Praise of the present moment all in sensations and sensuality, river woman is a carnal and fervent journey, where every detail of a fleeting and deep love — yes it can be — is magnified. And we find there the eternal fight that haunts the novels of Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, that between the call of the roots and dreams of flight, the outcome of which was clear in forest womanless in river woman — debacle awaits here.
There is something admirable in this exposure and in this desire brandished like a flag, so much so that it sometimes makes one uncomfortable. But that’s probably why it was worth the effort: female desire, in all its intensity and strength, surely still needs to be named and liberated. And fighters like Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette to tell it, who take him head on and embrace him. Against all odds.
river woman
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette
leaf merchant
252 pages