Far from the urbanity of May our joy remainthe man who now signs his novels under the name Kev Lambert immerses his readers in a whole new atmosphere.
By exploring childhood and this particular period that is the holiday season, the author invites the public to place themselves on the sidelines, for 424 pages, in order to observe this sometimes brutal society, this world full of adults. both sad and happy, talkative and silent.
To a certain point, due to the themes he explores in Snow trails (childhood, the region, a form of fantasy), Kev Lambert agrees that this new book perhaps echoes his very first novel, You’ll love what you killed (2017), despite the very different form.
“Both have autobiographical material. There, it’s a return to childhood, to childhood experiences, but I understand much more today about what I experienced as a child than when I wrote my first book,” says Kev Lambert, in interview at Soleil.
With more perspective and a sharper look at this period of his life, the author does not hesitate to raise political questions and to criticize the society or the era in which he grew up.
Faced with these sometimes difficult observations, he nevertheless juxtaposes the fertile imagination shown by children. Particularly through numerous references to video games.
“I really approached the imagination, in this book, as a mode of resistance, as a way of escape. As reality is too hard, they escape by building an imaginary world,” explains the winner of the 2023 Medici Prize.
The candor of its two young protagonists, Zoey and Émie-Anne, is thus accentuated by the holiday season. A special time in the year when the days pass at a slower pace.
“Everyone is off at the same time. In life, that’s really rare. […] There are people who work during the holiday season but, even when we work, we feel that it is not the same work. There is something lighter,” he observes.
A bit like during the first weeks of the pandemic?
“Yes, that’s true. It was super anxiety-inducing because of the event. […] But everyone accepted with common agreement that we were on pause, that work, productivity, all these injunctions of capitalist societies [étaient diminuées]. I think we realized how good it felt to lift those pressures.
“Imagine what could emerge as collective projects, as desires for change if we had more time [de vacances collectif] like these, moments of disengagement”, muses the 32-year-old author, to whom we also owe Roberval Quarrel (2018).
Childhood violence
Snow trails was first of all to be “a very small novel”, “a vignette”, “a realistic picture” of the Christmases that Kev Lambert experienced when he was younger… But by following the paths that opened up to him, he nevertheless produced a much larger work. A book where the light of the holiday season shines, but also the shadow of sneaky violence.
Because the days between Christmas and New Year are, for Kev Lambert, a time of great joy and a certain magic, but also a particular solitude.
“In our culture, this is a time when people who do not fit into the norm – the traditional nuclear family – experience loneliness much more. […] I think it’s a period that is even more painful because it is precisely constructed as being extraordinary and exceptional,” believes the artist, for whom it is necessary to write about these realities that we rarely talk about.
Even through the fantastic imagination in which they are immersed, its two young protagonists will thus face the brutality of rejection.
“They think that they are just going to find a space where everything is going to be possible, where they are going to have a magical mission and finally find their place in the world… But what they find in this imagination, even if they construct themselves, they are suffering,” adds the author, who thus bathes his new work between the innocence of childhood and the cruelty of reality.
Kev Lambert will be visiting the Maison de la lettres de Québec on November 22, as part of a reading of the Snow trailsperformed by Marie-Thérèse Fortin and directed by Denis Marleau.
