My review of Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba's 'triptych' of novels set in the Quebec forests originally appeared in Denver Quarterly, Vol 58, No 4, 2024.
A Voice Crying Out In The Quebec Wilderness
The Novels of Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Encabanée, 2018 in Quebec, 2021 in France, Folio/Gallimard
Sauvagines, 2019 in Quebec, 2022 in France, Stock
Bivouac, 2021 in Quebec, 2023 in France, Stock
by Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba
Gabriëlle Filteau-Chiba has exploded out of Quebec with a “triptych” of bestselling interconnected novels, translated from the French into six other languages, including English. Her second novel Sauvagines appeared in the UK this August 2023 under the name Feral. Her own story is as interesting as her fiction: fed up with city life in Montreal, she left to live in a cabin in the woods in the Kamouraska region of southeast Quebec. No electricity, no running water, for three years, emerging from the forest with three manuscripts, ranging from a fictionalized account of her own experience in her cabin, to a larger narrative about saving the Kamouraska region of Quebec from corporations intent on exploiting the timber and mining resources. Following the tradition of other North American writers like Mary Austin, Edward Abbey and most recently Richard Powers, Filteau-Chiba uses fiction—stories—to communicate her concerns to a larger audience about a region dear to her.
Encabanée, Filteau-Chiba’s first novel, is short—a novella or even a long short story. Readers don’t have to start with this book, the other two novels (especially Sauvagines, in translation as Feral) stand on their own. Encabinée helps though set the tone for the ‘triptych,’ as the narrator Anouk—like probably most of Filteau-Chiba’s readers—is a city person, throwing herself into a rural (very rural) setting. Literal translations of “encabanée” would give ‘locked up’ or ‘imprisoned,’ though Filteau-Chiba is having a little fun with the French and English words ‘cabine’ and ‘cabin’—Anouk is ‘encabined,’ which would make a great title for the English translation. This book invites readers into the Kamouraska woods, and language, and shows us around. Anouk has—like the author—left thirty-something city life in Montreal to live in a cabin without electricity or running water, and her story takes place in the middle of a Canadian winter. The novel reads more like a diary, which could have been not interesting, but Anouk (and Filteau-Chiba) has a sense of humor about the situation, especially in her ability to write lists (all translations mine):
List number 118
Qualities required for living in the woods:
—Self-mockery while you walk in snow shoes.
—Determination to chop wood until the end of time.
—Acceptance that there will never be too much wood inside.
—Optimism before the winter as long as Nature.
—Tolerance towards mediocre hygiene techniques.
—Patience filling the snow bucket to make it melt.
—Perseverance in shovelling the neverending snow.
—Economy in the use of candles and lamp oil even if your book is amazing and the night, infinite.
—Meditation in the the silent black about what possessed you to encabin yourself so far from everything.
—Observation of the fresh traces of your superiors in the food chain.
—Controlled release of urine in order to mark your territory around the cabin.
—Morality of concrete.
—And once again, that I still haven’t learned anything. (61-2)
Encabanée feels like a mix of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, though for Anouk, leaving the city is almost a matter of life and death—she sees her female friends in essence killing themselves in order to be the good women society expects, dependent on and living for their husbands and jobs. In her cabin, Anouk has no one to answer to but herself, and that’s a lot—getting water from the icy river nearby, chopping wood, shoveling paths in the snow to be able to do these things. Her car, buried in snow in 20° weather, could amazingly start and could take her back to civilization, but she chooses not too, using her free time to write and draw and generally think. Not that she’s not lonely, not that she’s without desires—her lists sometimes end up including a handsome man to share her sleeping bag:
List number 115
My three wishes for the genie in the lamp:
—Logs that burn until morning.
—A nightgown made from polar bear hide
—Robin Hood knocking at my door. (35)
And, one morning, as if summoned from her journal, à la Galatea, he appears. Here, Encabanée shifts to this new relationship, though more about Anouk’s cabin life would have been welcome—there are more cold months ahead and the book could have been a fictional funny Walden, or a sedentary Wild. Thoreau was fine being alone, or at least writing about being alone, while meanwhile going into town to hang out chez Emerson. And even Wild has moments of human contact. Filteau-Chiba too feels that the ‘wilderness experience’ goes better with other people around, which is always what Romantics like Wordsworth thought.
For all her independence, Anouk throws herself into relationships, and love, quickly, when the opportunities arise. She would find the old Earth First! rule—to never engage in radical environmental activitism with someone you haven't known for at least seven years—to be anathema to her personal philosophy, which seems to be that, if we’re going to defend the earth, we’re going to need to love and trust implicitly. Good thing the FBI doesn’t infiltrate environmental groups in Canada. Cough.
Sauvagines, the second of the ‘triptych,’ is the most engaging of the three. If Encabanée is the Thoreau-like ‘living in nature is awesome’ perspective on rural living, Sauvagines is a thriller with the perhaps more realistic concerns of a single woman living on her own in the woods. This book’s narrator, Raphaëlle, is not a city girl: she grew up in rural Quebec, farther to the east on the shore of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, though she too—like Anouk, who appears later in the book—has escaped—perhaps even is still escaping—from an extremely religious family, with whom she now has no contact. She has been working in the Kamouraska area as a game warden in the Canadian version of a national forest and, although she’s been there for a few years, people familiar with smaller rural towns will know that she’s still very much an outsider. Especially as a worker for the federal government—everyone in town knows who she is, but she has almost no friends besides Lionel, an older father-figure and retired game warden.
Like the national forests in America, Raphaëlle’s territory is large and understaffed, with corporate logging and mining rampant. There are recreational opportunities, and trails, like the one to the local landmark, Gros Pin, the oldest and largest white pine in the area but mostly it’s fishing and hunting. Raphaëlle’s job mainly to check tags from annoyed-to-angry truck-fulls of hunters, with only her government rig, uniform, and sidearm as her authority. After rescuing her dog from an illegal poaching trap, which she then destroys, she discovers that the poacher is already aware of her, has been stalking her and, after she destroys his traps, is angry. Sauvagines then becomes a mix of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone and Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon Series. Raphaëlle’s detective work, and retaliation, are outside of the law. She uses her work resources and legal power to perform field and online research, but she knows the government won’t help her, or any women caught in this situation: her stalker, we soon learn, comes from a powerful family, with relatives in the police and local government.
The French title Sauvagines is untranslatable, though related to ‘savage’ or ‘wild’: the word “sauvagine,” as Raphaëlle explains to Anouk in the book, refers to wild birds, especially waterfowl, and/or smaller mammals (“mustelids” from the Mustelidae family, from otters, beavers to wolverines) hunted or trapped for their fur. It’s an older French word—Anouk doesn’t know it—but it’s tied to the trapping culture of North America, which is tied, too, to the colonization of North America: European trappers pushing west into the continent in advance of white settlers. Raphaëlle sees herself and other women as sauvagines, as part of the general class of creatures dominated by men. For her, it’s no surprise that the man poaching and indiscriminately killing off coyotes and lynx is the same one stalking her, nor that he has a history of violence against women in the area. She situates his behavior in the tradition of men who colonized North America, the ones who hunted and trapped species to extinction and near extinction, committed genocide against First Tribes people, and logged and mine dthe land down to dangerous levels. Her anger erupts later in the book in the following mental rant directed to a general ‘you,’ which soon narrows to some specific male you’s, like those in government:
Yes, I’m crossing the line of what our country thinks is right, and I’m disobeying the Criminal Code, but I’m much more scared of the poaching of the last great animals than of a life in a cage. Sometimes, history shows, disobedience and rebellion have permitted progress.
I’ve been behind bars ever since I started this job...registering animals whose heads are the targets of a post mortem shooting game, to realize that this practice seems like normalized slaughter...
They’ve always told me that the important thing is to never put a stick into the spokes of this regional economy. No, you’re wrong Mr. Governor. You have a romantic picture of the wild northern forest full of animals hanging in your office, but really, in this land, we’re witnesses to a destruction in all directions. The huge beautiful wild territory that dazzles and awes and captivates the imaginations of tourists or even Canadians when they talk about northern Canada or Kamouraska is going to be a thing of the past very soon....I can’t take part in this charade with a clear conscience anymore. I can’t any more, can’t, just like as a woman I can’t be silent about the violence in cities....
And here the ‘you’ shifts to her poacher/stalker, who piles poached coyotes on his family’s farm:
Rage has grown in me for years. I’ve swallowed it and swallowed it but it won’t go down this time. Whatever happens, I know about you, those hundreds of bodies piled on your family farm, the warnings of some women and the whispered confessions of others, your disdain faced with the Nature which as given you so much, that no, I can’t stand it anymore. (287-8)
First mentioned in Encabanée, and returned to in the Filteau-Chiba’s third novel Bivouac, are two incidents which happened before her triptych began—involving “écoguerriers”—ecowarriors, radical environmentalists involved in acts of sabotage in defense of the earth. The first is them dumping a dead beluga whale on the steps of the Quebec government in Montreal, to raise awareness about how resource extraction (mining) in and around the Kamouraska region is affecting the birthing grounds of belugas in the southern most tip of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where most of the rivers in the Kamouraska ‘Haut-Pays’ or High Country drain into.
The second incident backfires, or has unintended consequences: activists attempt to stop a train full of bitumen bound for Alberta, by placing (or falling? unclear) trees across the tracks. They post warning signs miles ahead in order to warn the train conductor to stop in time, but for some reason he doesn’t, and the train to derails, killing him. One of these activists is Rio, the same man who stumbles on Anouk’s cabin in Encabanée, on his way to a new identity in America. Rio resurfaces in Bivouac and becomes a third major character. Haunted by the train incident, he nevertheless remains more haunted by the continued decimation of the Kamouraska region and returns to help organize a protest camp, Camp Bivouac, to call for the government to declare the area a national park.
Like Abbey and Powers, Filteau-Chiba uses multiple perspectives in Bivouac. The scope of the novel goes beyond any one character’s perspective, and this range of points of view shows how and why people have different reasons for being “écoguerriers.” The novel depicts different levels or responses, different comfort levels in how to resist, from peaceful demonstrations to sabotage to in at least one case, a willingness to commit violence against another human. These levels force readers to consider what limits or lengths they themselves might go to in the defense of the Earth, though the one thing all Filteau-Chiba’s characters share is an understanding that being polite doesn’t work—writing letters and donating to The Sierra Club (or the Canadian equivalents) accomplishes nothing when the government is owned by corporations. At the very least, civil disobedience (à la Thoreau) is called for—thus the Bivouac camp.
Bivouac feels most indebted to previous novels about bands of ecowarriors, such as Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (plus its sequel Heyduke Lives!) and the more recent and also excellent Overstory by Richard Powers. Bivouac leans toward the more serious storytelling of Powers—there is none of the winking self-aware humor of Abbey, whose characters are more like caricatures. The Monkey Wrench Gang is satire, comedy. Overstory is a tragedy—I can’t remember a single funny line, not even of dialogue, in the whole book. In Bivouac, even Anouk’s humor from Encabanée is muted: no more funny lists. That said, Filteau-Chiba definitely wants readers to see the larger situation of the decimation of the land as something serious, sad and angering, but to remember our humanity and connection not just to the land but to each other, the pleasure we feel from connection and love. Anouk and Raphaëlle love each other intensely (and quickly). At the beginning of Bivouac they’ve spent a whole winter living together in a yurt—that’s a lot of intimacy. But they’re Romantics. The first half to two-thirds of Bivouac are more about working out of relationships among other larger communities in the area, like a commune, and the Bivouac Camp. With Rio’s return, instead of Anouk having to choose between her two lovers, polyamory ensues.
At times, Bivouac can feel a little bogged down with this working-out of relationships, be it long discussions between characters about their relationship status, or long sections of characters wondering to themselves whether someone likes them. Filteau-Chiba would argue that this is just realistic, that that’s what people do. But sometimes two or three chapters about relationships feel like they could be summarized in, say, one. There are larger themes being explored, bigger things at stake. Of course, Filteau Chiba’s whole point of Bivouac is to show how relationships are the defense of the Earth. Loving and trusting another person is the microcosm of loving and trusting the larger community, and the planet.
The emphasis on relationships in Bivouac emerges out of Filteau-Chiba’s playfulness—there’s a lot more dialogue, and the opportunity to see characters playing with the ‘franglais’ of Quebec and the border country, where everyone on the Quebec side knows some English and people in northern Maine know some French. There’s some unique mixed language going on that will be difficult for a translator. (And in fact even the French editions of Filteau-Chiba’s books have glossaries with definitions of Quebecois words.) Standard translations from France-french, like Marguerite Duras or Michel Houellebecq, seem to simply translate everything, turning a simple ‘bonjour’ into a ‘hello,’ when keeping the bonjour might help readers feel the novel’s world more, like how Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy slip whole sentences of another language into their novels—understandable by context and the authors’ belief that their readers are smart enough to figure it out.
Here’s one example from Bivouac, fairly easy to understand with a basic knowledge of French. In a chapter from Anouk’s perspective, when she’s expressing her doubts to Raphaëlle (whose pet name for her is Nounoush) about living on a commune:
—Mon amour, je sais pas si j’ai ce qui'il faut pour vivre en commune...
—Tu seras peut-être tentée de partager ton lit, blague-t-elle.
—Ça, crains pas, chus folle de toi.
—Moi-tou, Nounoush.
My straight translation:
—My love, I don’t know if I have what it takes to live on a commune...
—Maybe you’ll be tempted to share your bed, she jokes.
—Don’t be scared of that, I’m crazy for you.
—Me too, Nounoush.
The “chus” is Quebecois-slang for ‘je suis’. I don’t think there’s anyway to capture it in English, unfortunately, other than “I’m.” More interesting is the franglais phrase “Moi-tou,” the ‘tou’ being a frenchified form of the English word ‘too.’ I translate it here as ‘me too.’ Which is fine, but loses the feel of the local, and intimate, slang. I’d keep it as “moi-tou” or even ‘moi-too’—most readers will know ‘moi’ means ‘me,’ and if they don’t, they’ll understand the context, and it’s a playful reminder that we’re in a (mostly) francophone country.
The larger tension—which at least Raphaëlle (and Filteau-Chiba) are aware of—is that they and most of the Bivouac Camp protesters are outsiders. People in the commune, some of them, have lived in the area a long time, but they feel cut off from even the nearest town. When ‘locals’ do appear in any of Filteau-Chiba’s novels, especially the men, they tend to be bad—more than willing to kill off all the coyotes and lynx, to clearcut the forests and mine the hell out of what’s left. A more sympathetic look at the locals—their needs and fears, their economic dependency on timber and mining—might have created an even bigger tragedy. For example, having someone who actually works for the logging companies might at least have given readers a sense of what rural life is like there. Is it realistic to create a national park to replace resource extraction? Should—could—a logger really change his or her life and shift to a career in tourism? What drawbacks does tourism create to a community tied to it?
Filteau-Chiba, one senses, would still vote for the national park, as would most readers, but people living in rural areas aren’t raving MAGA fanatics, or the Canadian equivalent. They have lives, lifestyles, cultures, which they want to protect. They may not like corporations coming and destroying the land, but neither do they want a bunch of écoguerriers from the big cities coming in and telling them what to do. Unfortunately, people—men especially Filteau-Chiba argues—who feel they’re going to lose their jobs to a bunch of college-edumacated hippies—can get angry, and maybe dangerous. Thus, in Bivouac, tragedy ensues.
Abbey and Powers recognized that their novels would mostly be read by a bunch of college liberals from the coasts, or places like Montreal (which is, after all, technically on the Atlantic coast). As readers, we do want the écoguerriers to win, and we think anyone who wants to clearcut trees and frack is evil, even as we read our books and drive our cars and use our smartphones and eat our chocolate. But, do people (American, Canadians, anyone) not have the right to intervene when the land is being plundered? The obvious answer for anyone reading these novels is yes, the land needs protecting, from corporations and governments (Canadian, Quebecois, American) and corporations that control governments.
The success of Filteau-Chiba’s novels, along with the success of Overstory, and the continued sales of The Monkey Wrench Gang, show the power of fiction, of stories, to build love for, and connection to, the land, even for readers living in big cities. Abbey, and Mary Austin before him, wrote essays—good ones, with the same message or intention—but it was the stories that reached a popular audience. Abbey can be credited, at least in part, with the explosion of radical environmentalism in the 70s and 80s up to today.
Filteau-Chiba knows this legacy. She could have emerged from her years in the woods like a humorous modern-day Thoreau, with essays about living simply and protecting the planet. But she knows that relationships inspire people—and where there are relationships, there are stories. Networks of relationships are what support the environmental movement—people’s stories. We’ve seen recently how the media and government can create narratives (or, a Narrative) out of any facts, true or not. Stories are the best way to fight Narratives.
