COLD CHAOS, Stories from a North, is Nathalie Guilbeaultâs first collection of short stories.
Guilbeault is the author of the novels INHALED and WHEN I BECAME NEVER.
âSet in northern Quebec, where the author lived most of her adolescent years, the stories decompose the emotional and physical realities of living between the 49th and 55th northern parallels, inside the peacefulness and isolation of its landscape. Humorous, dark, and sometimes tragic, Guilbeault's fourteen stories wink at each other, bringing the reader into a larger narrative, one that brushes against the themes of loss; of love; of coming of age.
Auto-fictive in essence, Guilbeault's writings press on memory's core, a place where imagination and truths mingle
COLD CHAOS, Stories from a North, is Nathalie Guilbeaultâs first collection of short stories.
Guilbeault is the author of the novels INHALED and WHEN I BECAME NEVER.
âSet in northern Quebec, where the author lived most of her adolescent years, the stories decompose the emotional and physical realities of living between the 49th and 55th northern parallels, inside the peacefulness and isolation of its landscape. Humorous, dark, and sometimes tragic, Guilbeault's fourteen stories wink at each other, bringing the reader into a larger narrative, one that brushes against the themes of loss; of love; of coming of age.
Auto-fictive in essence, Guilbeault's writings press on memory's core, a place where imagination and truths mingle
Day in and day out, it stretches before me: long and narrow lake Massawippi, located in North Hatley, my companion for the past three years. I like to think I have been its companion, too. Another bystander of both our flows; our movements. The Abenaki people tell us it is a lake filled with an abundance of clear water. Clearer thinking for me, yesâI am a February baby, after allâabout my past, memories I chose to marvel about, right here, for the curious. To my complete surprise, winter, cold and humid, talked to me. I listened to what it had to say; what it was helping dig outâand stories emerged, in my heart, auto-fictive in essence. And not.
This collection is not meant to form a historical account of the blue El Dorado this period was considered by many to be. Or so little. It simply steeps inside imaginationâs cold well while winking at lifeâs warm truisms. This collection is a way out, a riverâs mouth from which fresh and dead leaves flow.
My adolescent years were spent in James Bay, during the execution of one of the worldâs largest hydroelectric projects, a period of my life I recall with rare lucidity. A golden age of sortsâmy fatherâs, a pioneer of the Quebec north, as well. This sentiment, like the images that light them, is vivid in its holding of this time, a feeling of freedom and hope and worry met by the birth of my children only. The birth of meanings. Stories, witnesses that speak, and telling me I was there. The young girl I was, her mind caught inside the taigaâs tentacles, and the adults they held hostage. And, of course, they held her, too.
I am still here, and I remember, I doâthe beauty and the foul.
For better and for worse.
ADELINE
Look at her. See her, wonât you? For her sake.
Someone needs to.
She is sleeping in her bed, a curled, small body clinging to a light blanket. Too light to fight the cold floating in the room. Her left thumb tickles the inside of her palate as she rubs the bridge of her nose with her index finger, sucking security in. Trying to. No light casted on her, and inside her chest, more obscurity; a child's turmoil needing to rise. Was it the wind that called to her that stormy nightâto open her eyes, stand and walk away from her little selfâto where? The fiery winter blowing on Labrador land, a land she knows nothing about. The map to a treasure chest. A quest, morphing inside her little heart.
Barefoot, she walks the short corridor, to the entrance door. No one had thought to lock the door. No one, for only Mother is there. Daddyâgone far from home. A dam to build. A dyke to inspect. A wife to flee.
Outside, the howling is soft, yet constant. A constant howling blowing inside her head.
Her pink flannel night gown, white lace at the collar, is waving around her knees. In the middle of the front yard, she stands, half-dressed. Over-exposed. Snowbanks, her walls. Nighttime, a hand. The little girl is facing the other trailers located across her street, her short auburn hair tossed by the rapid snowfall, her cheeks, rosier than normal. She stares yet does not see, does not feel, until her bare feet start to scream. Her toes, too.
A hand to her arm, and the motherâs squeeze is hard, the pull back to her home, just as well. Back in her bed, waiting: A cover that covers nothing but good dreams. A blanket that crushes.
This could be her story.
And I ask myself, how was it she heard my steps?
I donât know.
And sometimes, I donât believe she didâcome to me, knowingly. So unlike her. Then and now. Maybe this mother had been sleepwalking, as I had, to me, the subconscious, the seat of her instincts that hadnât diedânot yetâand saving me. Or maybe was it to save herself, is often all I can believe. From the worldâs eye that would be thrown upon her.
All I know is that the longing has been long.
To be held.
Never satisfied or answered.
Still to this day.
Nathalie Guilbeaultâs short story collection Cold Chaos is an exquisite testimony to how powerful the short form can be in the right hands. These fourteen interconnected stories, revolving around a protagonist (Adeline) residing in northern Quebec, are some of the most consistently readable and engaging prose Iâve come across. There is not a single dud in this fourteen-round chamber. No skippable tracks. Every story has the feel of a much larger story, and together they form like Voltron to create something much bigger. And thatâs the genius of this collection. Each piece is executed with such scalpeled precision. They go down so smoothly and quickly but contain so much. At the end of each story, before continuing to the next, I needed to take a minute (sometimes more, often much more) to ponder how, exactly, Guilbeault had achieved such a readable, vivid, and emotionally complex experience with so few words. Itâs something Iâm still trying to dissect.
Most of these stories take place in northern Quebec, and you can feel it. Like, in your bones. Think: Ursula K. Le Guinâs The Left Hand of Darkness. But itâs much more than just an ever-present environmental chill. There is the sense within this collection of an inner shudder, a kind of atomic emotional vibration creating its own heat, holding everything together by never quite solidifying in one spot. A vulnerability to these stories that is open, warm, and enveloping juxtaposed against the inevitable deepfreeze benefits of situational compartmentalization. The latter is possibly best illustrated in a beautiful passage from the title story: âTime had gone. / Time had come to leave everything behind. To leave the density of all her memories inside a ground that would hold them forever, inside its cold. A cold that prevents the rot from invading matters that matter.â Read that again. These four sentences are not the acme, but the baseline of prose here. This is the kind of care that Guilbeault brings to each line, each story, and the overarching concept of the entire collection.
If you are a fan of fiction or memoir or the in between, this collection will blow your mind. If you are a fan of short story collections or autofiction (or both) this will end up in your top ten. If you know the glow of authors like Amy Hempel, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Ellen, Denis Johnson, Margaret Malone, and Rita Bullwinkel (to name a few) you will not be disappointed. Nathalie Guilbeault is a readerâs writer and a writerâs writer and an incredibly gifted storyteller. I canât wait to read the novels she has already written, and I am eager to see what she produces next.