THE MORNING LIST
In this week’s “The World of Books” selection, the rediscovery, with unpublished works by Claude Lévi-Strauss that bring together the first texts of the young researcher in Brazil, and a new edition ofHenry the Greenby Gottfried Keller,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 imagination, in snow trailsby Kev Lambert, and about the exaltation of bodies in aestheticsAllie Rowbottom’s first novel. Finally, an exploration of the deepest impulses of men in the final volume of the “Kingdom” cycle by Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares.
NOVEL. “Snow Trails” by Kev Lambert
keep walking snow trailsthe fourth novel by Kev (ex-Kevin) Lambert, is going off track. At a child’s level, the novel draws on this vague and fantastic source, on the edge of a new world: an augmented identity, both small and large, ghostly and extralucid. On Christmas Day, 8-year-old Zoey sets out 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 bursts into reality.
Since he cannot be like others, behave like a child, the child fears having “he dug too deep into his dark matter”thus freeing the creature, which is embedded in Zoey’s most secret room: the Dome, refuge of her thoughts, where she hides when the adults “Fuck the bitch”. Heading to this underworld that the boy thought he knew, he will sink, with Emie, into a “something you don’t know the name of”.
Everything in this hermaphrodite novel is both false and true, a childish chimera and an initiatory ordeal. By facing otherness and empathy, the two cousins will become themselves. Zoey allows herself to become “she” and no longer “him.” Games, fables, like literature, are a way of sculpting existence. Kevin Lambert, who himself began a gender transition and chose to sign snow trails by his childhood nickname, Kev, brings Zoey and Emie out of their cocoon, to the other side of themselves. It shows that enchantment is a category of reality. Ju. MY.
UNPUBLISHED. “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 them, and it was in Brazil, during his first “camps” of encounter with the Caduveo and Bororo Indians, where he decided not to abandon it.
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