A year after winning the prestigious Medici Prize, Kev Lambert published Snow Trails, a novel where we explore the traumas of a child in a school and family environment tinged with racism, homophobia, sexism, fatphobia and toxic masculinity. We warn you: after reading this book, you will have a hard time ignoring the — deep — flaws in Quebec society.
How do you describe the whirlwind preceding the Medici Prize?
Kev Lambert: When my novel (May our joy remain) was released in France, there was a controversy over sensitive reading. A lot of people were interested in the book because they wanted to corner me or fuel controversy. In France, the virulence of the public debate is very different from what we see here. There are people with really bad intentions. Journalists want to make you say the wrong sentence or make you insult your opponent. It was destabilizing. When the price arrived, it came to answer all these controversies. As if the price said that it was the text that was interesting.
You publish a book by signing Kev Lambert for the first time. Explain this choice to us.
I’m transitioning to something more neutral and more ambiguous. I don’t identify as male or female, and I don’t feel the need to put a label on what I experience. It’s a transition towards difference, more than one thing and vagueness, but I didn’t want to change my first name. The gender of a first name is a bit arbitrary anyway, but I know that socially it is connoted that way. As my everyday first name is more Kev than Kevin, I thought I could take that name also for public life. I find it more neutral.
After a detour to Montreal in Let Our Joy Remain, you return to Saguenay to set the story of a novel there for the third time. To what extent does this territory galvanize your inspiration?
Kev Lambert: My writing imagination is very much linked to my childhood. This territory is still the theater of my inner movements, even if I no longer live there full time. I find it interesting to explore a place by addressing several facets, characters and eras, a bit like Stephen King does, almost all of whose books take place in Maine.
Would you return to live in Saguenay?
Kev Lambert: Today, the injuries I had related to my region are a thing of the past. It would be possible to return to live there, but at the moment, I am not doing so for work reasons. Montreal is where I work the most, but I’m not always here. I have an apartment in Montreal with a roommate and I live in Mauricie with my boyfriend in a chalet without electricity.
In Snow Trails, we discover Zoey, a child who carries secrets that gnaw at him. How did you construct the story to say so little about it, without weakening our interest?
Kev Lambert: In literature, we often approach trauma using fragments. By definition, there is something that escapes us, holes in experience and meaning. In psychotherapy, the work in relation to trauma is to manage to include it in a story. I therefore gave myself the challenge of creating a form where the trauma would be reinscribed in a narrative. This is not a classic narrative, because trauma involves an element of incomprehension. I wanted to show the indirect consequences of the trauma in Zoey and her cousin Émie-Anne, their reactions, how their personalities are constructed and how they wear masks which were forged by their protective reflexes.
When you describe his school and his kinship, are you shooting cannonballs at our faults of
Company ?
Kev Lambert: Yes. It’s not an autobiographical novel, but I wanted to recreate the environment in which I grew up, because it was violent. It relied on hierarchy, mockery to put others down and lift oneself up. It was really difficult growing up in a world where there are always people who can be rejected for incomprehensible reasons. In the novel, I show that school is a world made of aggression and wickedness. Zoey feels watched by lots of eyes who want to corner him and catch his flaws. We still live in a universe that is constantly in a form of judgment in the face of the plurality of human experiences.
Your dialogues make popular speech heard. What does this translate?
Kev Lambert: The creativity of the language of Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean. The novel is inspired by my family, even if the characters are not my real aunts and uncles; some look like them. I feel a lot of ambivalence about this family.
I didn’t have my place there, I was always referred to as different and rejected, but at the same time, I found them fascinating. They were very funny. Their language was creative. I wanted to pay homage to this atmosphere of family gatherings which are as beautiful as they are ugly.
Zoey and her cousin Emie dive headfirst into an imaginary world full of demons, as if to escape a life that bores and hurts them, while being attracted to this universe.
Kev Lambert: Yes, they build this universe to resist the world of adults, who are not interested in them. The adults didn’t try to understand what they were experiencing. At the same time, there is pleasure in the fear they feel. This ties in with the mysterious and obsessive aspect of trauma that we seek to understand and approach.
You illustrate a family in which we are not interested in others and where we should not ask questions that could revive buried emotions. To what extent do we suffer from incommunicability?
Kev Lambert: It’s very strong in the families where I grew up. Asking questions is easy. It’s as if we wanted to stick our noses into matters that don’t concern us. It’s very cultural.
My father and my uncles were raised like this. Probably my grandparents too. I grew up with them all my life, but we don’t know each other deeply. People don’t dare ask me questions about what I do. This distance between us seems so great that it creates disinterest or difficulty in becoming interested. It’s unfortunate. When I meet people, I try to ask questions and show interest, because that aspect of relationships makes me suffer. I often felt like I wasn’t interesting to the people around me growing up.
INFO | Snow trails, Kev LAMBERT, HELIOTROPE EDITIONS, 2024
https://www.editionsheliotrope.com
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