树民 (2016)

《树民》（英语：Barkskins）是由美国国家图书奖与普利策奖得主安妮·普露创作的长篇小说，于2016年由斯克里布纳之子公司出版，并由国家地理频道改编为电视剧《咆哮之森》，于2020年5月播出。

这部作品是安妮·普鲁时隔十四年重返文坛的代表作，采用史诗式叙述手法，描绘两个与森林密切相关家族的多代变迁与命运起伏。

内容简介

《树民》是一部横跨三个世纪的历史小说，以森林与人类的关系为核心主题，描绘两个家族在北美大陆的兴衰与命运。故事始于17世纪的新法兰西地区，随着时代推进，涵盖殖民扩张、工业化与现代化进程对自然环境造成的变迁。小说透过多位人物的视角，展现森林如何从一种文化、经济与精神依靠，逐渐沦为被开发与掠夺的对象。普鲁借此反思人类文明与自然世界的冲突与失衡，并以细腻笔触呈现自然生态的壮丽与脆弱。

中文出版

中文版《树民》由人民文学出版社于2020年出版，译者为陈恒（Helen Chen）。

Barkskins is a 2016 novel by American writer Annie Proulx. It tells the story of two immigrants to New France, René Sel and Charles Duquet, and of their descendants. It spans over 300 years and witnesses the deforestation of the New World from the arrival of Europeans into the contemporary era of global warming.

Plot

The eponymous "barkskins" are indentured servants, transported from Paris slums to the wilds of New France in 1693, "... to clear the land, to subdue this evil wilderness," (p. 17) according to their master, a seigneur. The two men are contracted for three years of service to earn land of their own, but Charles Duquet runs away at the first opportunity, seeking to make a fortune for himself in the fur trade or by any means he can. René Sel, on the other hand, dutifully wields the axe clearing farmland for the master. Later, he is forced to marry the master’s cast off Mi’kmaq woman, Mari, a healer who gives him children. The Sel family heritage is thus Indigenous and working class.

Duquet, luckily surviving his escape through the wilderness, has a fortune to make, mostly on furs and lumber, and by swindling others whenever he can get away with it. Only then will he marry the daughter of a Dutch business partner, open an office in Boston, therefore Anglicizing the family name to Duke, and father or adopt the boys who will build the Duke & Sons timber empire after him.

All the while, for the Sel family, there is unceasing discontent. The young are always seeking their future as First Nations people in a whiteman's world. Indigenous lumbermen, for example, were always recruited for river work balancing on the longest logs rushing down a river where an awkward move could get a man crushed before he drowned.(p. 299)

Major themes

Nature

Human struggles with nature are a recurring theme in Annie Proulx's books. About the forest in Barkskins, Proulx said, "It's the underpinning of life. Everything is linked to the forest. This is but one facet of larger things, like climate change and the melting of the ice. So deforestation is part of a much, much larger package."

Borders

As noted in her memoir, Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx grew up in New England, attended college in Canada, and had a lifelong practice of spending summers in Newfoundland and winters in the States. Thus, she was well acquainted with the geography of the novel and familiar with national and cultural borderlands. Proulx herself descended from English Americans on her mother's side and French Canadians on her father's, which makes her "mixed", although not to the same degree as the Sels in Barkskins. For the Sel family, the whiteman's cultural borders were closed to them in many ways because the borders of their homelands were never closed enough.

Reception

With few exceptions, reviewers praised the novel particularly with regard to the brilliance of Annie Proulx’s prose, the intimately detailed scenes by which she reveals the complex inner lives of her characters, and/or breathtaking scenes of fearful destruction as well as awesome beauty. The forests and deforestation of the New World underlie the epic scope of the book, while human adventures range beyond the central concerns of forest ecology and the logging industry. The narrative is partitioned into books that turn the reader’s attention to one family or another across generations.