THE MORNING LIST
In the “World of Books” selection this week, rediscoveries, with unpublished works by Claude Lévi-Strauss bringing together the first texts of the young researcher in Brazil, and a new edition ofHenry the Greenby Gottfried Keller, classic of German-speaking literature. But also contemporary reflections on childhood and the imagination, in Snow trailsby Kev Lambert, and on the exaltation of bodies in AestheticaAllie Rowbottom’s first novel. Finally, an exploration of men’s deepest impulses in the final volume of the “Kingdom” cycle by Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares.
NOVEL. “Snow Trails”, by Kev Lambert
Walk on Snow trailsthe fourth novel by Kev (ex-Kevin) Lambert, is going off-piste. At a child’s level, the novel draws from this vague and fantastical source, on the edge of a new world: an augmented identity, both small and large, phantasmagorical and extralucid. On Christmas Day, Zoey, 8 years old, goes on a mission, helped by her cousin Emie, in pursuit of one of her visions – while switching from one video game to another, a masked demon intrudes in reality.
Because he cannot be like the others, to behave like a boy, the child fears having “dug too deep into its dark matter”thus freeing the creature, which encrusts itself into Zoey’s most secret room: the Dome, refuge of her thoughts, where it hides when the adults “fuck him the female dog”. Heading into this underworld that the boy thought he knew, he will sink, with Emie, into a “something they don’t know the name of”.
Everything in this hermaphrodite novel is both false and true, a childish chimera and an initiatory ordeal. Coming face to face with otherness and empathy, the two cousins will become themselves. Zoey allows herself to become “she”, and no longer “he”. Games, fables, like literature, are a way of sculpting existence. Kevin Lambert, who himself began a gender transition and chose to sign Snow trails from his childhood nickname, Kev, brings Zoey and Emie out of their cocoon, on the other side of themselves. Shows that enchantment is a category of reality. You. E.
UNRELEASED. “The Widest Horizons of the World”, by Claude Lévi-Strauss
When Claude Lévi-Strauss, a young associate professor of philosophy, arrived in Sao Paulo in February 1935, many paths seemed to open before him. Anthropology is just one of these, and it was in Brazil, during his first “fields” meeting the Caduveo and Bororo Indians, that he decided not to leave it.
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