Les âmes torrentielles par Agathe Portail (review)

Reviewed by: Les âmes torrentielles par Agathe Portail Philippe Brand Portail, Agathe. Les âmes torrentielles. Actes Sud, 2023. ISBN 978-2-330-17759-1. Pp. 272. Were it not for the mention of the year 2015 at the start of the text, a reader might initially take this novel as the tale of an almost timeless place, opening with the scene of Danilo, a Patagonian gaucho, sharpening his facón by the side of a mountain spring before tending to his troop of livestock (11). Spanish (and Indigenous) words are sprinkled throughout the text, often with an explanatory footnote from the author, but as references to American tourists and brand names such as North Face and WhatsApp also begin to proliferate, the reader quickly realizes that this is a story of worlds in conflict, of rural and traditional ways of life struggling against forces of development, exemplified here by an enormous new dam that will soon flood Danilo's ancestral lands. As the taciturn gaucho with a heart of gold embarks on one final journey, shepherding his troop across the dam and down the valley, he is joined by Alma, an attractive young woman with a troubled past. As that description might suggest, the characters and plot of this novel lean heavily on some hoary literary tropes, yet the texture of that world is described with evocative, compelling details. If the various threads of the intrigue are tied up perhaps a bit too neatly in the end, in a narrative closure that could happen only in fiction, the themes and real-world issues brought up in the novel are engaging. Like the cowboys of the American West, the gaucho is a complex symbolic figure that has long been mythologized, and Danilo himself refers no less than three times to "l'incontournable Martín Fierro d'Hernández," an epic poem about the gauchos first published in the late nineteenth century (170). Alma, on the other hand, is Tehuelche, and she represents a more frequently erased history, that of the Indigenous populations of Patagonia. As Alma reflects back on the picaresque series of misadventures that have characterized her life, she also mourns the dispossession of her childhood home, as well as more intangible losses in the form of Indigenous ways of knowing that she herself has already forgotten, "Ce genre de savoir s'est perdu, elle n'en garde que quelques noms mystérieux qu'elle ne relie plus à rien: suico, tusca, pouliot. … Elle a tout oublié, n'avait pas conscience au moment où ces recommandations s'échangeaient près du feu combien elles valaient d'or" (72–73). Yet all is not lost, and even though the Patagonian landscape is transformed and people are displaced by the new dam, other forms of resistance are emerging. Alma realizes that she holds important knowledge after she discovers that she may be one of the last living speakers of her native language, "ce trésor de l'âme qu'elle a chéri et protégé" (245). Even as the novel follows a well-trod narrative path and ends exactly the way you imagine it will, Alma's and Danilo's stories and the new possibilities of engagement that they begin to envision remain compelling. End Page 145 Philippe Brand Lewis & Clark College (OR) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French