In this new school year, I don’t have the choice to often chat with Kevin Lambert, even when he’s in France and jetlagged, and I have to say that I like that, because it’s at least for good news. . His novel May our joy remain found himself on Thursday in the first selection of the Médicis Prize, which concluded the opening of the annual marathon of the main major French literary prizes. I’ve been waiting for this list for a week, I checked the alerts at 5am. With Kevin Lambert, Éric Chacour and Louis-Daniel Godin on the starting line for many prizes, it’s generating interest on this side of the Atlantic.
Why have local authors made a breakthrough in France in recent years? I am obviously thinking of Dany Laferrière the immortal, but also of Dominique Fortier or Michel Jean.
“I am told here that the French vision of Quebec literature is a bit folkloric. They would be stories from a country of yesteryear,” explains Kevin Lambert, whom I caught while he was going to Marseille for his promotional tour. “It says more about them than it does about us, because we know it doesn’t look like that.” The social discourse changes here, on what Quebec literature is. Quebec texts are very modern, there is style, we work on the language, people talk to me about it often. »
In any case, I agree with Kevin: they have never read Stephen King like people, being force-fed Parisian translations of American novels, literature that they adore, just a stone’s throw from Quebec.
In fact, I bothered Kevin to take a somewhat dizzying tour of all the lists on which his third novel appears this fall: Médicis, Décembre, Pantagruel, Blù-Jean-Marc Roberts, Goncourt, Goncourt des lycéens and… Goncourt des detainees.
Honestly, I didn’t know there was a Goncourt of Inmates – it would be a good idea to import from France for the Booksellers Prize. Probably the nomination that most closely reflects Kevin Lambert’s social conscience. “This award considers inmates as members of society, which is what the prison is trying to undo. It tells them that we want to hear their voices,” he notes.
Interviews, public readings, meetings in bookstores, Kevin Lambert has been doing for two weeks what the writer Marie-Claire Blais, whom he honors in May our joy remain, agreed to do despite his immense shyness: accompany his book. Defend him. Having tortured her several times with interviews, I know how Marie-Claire Blais did not shy away, like Kevin Lambert.
For a few days, he feared that the controversy over the sensitive reading of manuscripts, which seemed to offend many sensibilities, would prevent him from talking about the only thing that really interests him: literature. The people who read and whom he meets all over France are there to bring him back to basics. Despite everything, he found it important to explain his approach and his experience, to dispel the misunderstandings surrounding this practice.
To my great surprise, the writer Christine Angot, a member of the Goncourt Academy, which is not known for sparing anyone, defended the writer’s approach.
All the same, how does he experience this whirlwind? “I try to live with joy. It’s not natural for me, because it seems like I don’t experience positive things well,” he replies. Which doesn’t surprise me.
I am convinced that many people who have read it think that Kevin Lambert, by his style, his themes, his committed side and the fact that he is openly gay, is an urbanite who is nothing short of cliché. . Nothing could be less true. This Chicoutimi native doesn’t like the city, he prefers to be in nature. I’ve been reading him since his first novel, You’ll love what you killed, who saw me a little in two, but before harassing him with each nomination for a prestigious prize, we used to, from time to time, exchange our photos of picking chanterelles in the woods. “I think I’m bored, I don’t like French cities very much, Montreal scares me, I feel far away,” he confides, somewhere in France. “Autumn is my favorite season, if you’re not in the forest you miss the most beautiful colors, it only lasts a few days. »
It’s true, I hurt every time I miss the flamboyant landscapes of the Laurentians at the beginning of October.
Kevin Lambert will be back in Montreal in the coming days, to attend the reading-show of May our joy remaindesigned with Angela Konrad, and presented at the International Literature Festival.
But if Kevin Lambert makes it to the last lists, if he is a finalist at Goncourt, I cannot imagine that he will not be present in Paris when the winner is announced. I’m ready to jump on my first plane since the pandemic to be there. I ask him the intrusive question of all journalists: if you win, how do you plan to react? “Hey boy,” he replies. I think I won’t react right away and that two weeks later everything will come back to me. »
In the woods, I’m sure of it.