Vilma Fuentes: Levi-Strauss and his century

L

read the Monique Lévi-Strauss's memoirs is like exploring a century of history. Through a series of interviews conducted by writer and academic Marc Lambron, Claude Lévi-Strauss's widow reconstructs his voyage, with all the vicissitudes of navigation, in the turbulent seas of the 20th century.

Between October and December 2024, in the midst of around thirty hours of interviews, Monique Lévi-Strauss agreed to retrace a century-long life, which began in 1925 with her birth in Shanghai and continued in Paris, Germany, and the United States, before settling permanently in our capital , notes critic and journalist Lambron.

Without the veil of false modesty, the interviewee displays a flawless memory to give us, through her life, the lives of other actors and protagonists of the century, thanks to her mastery of the French language as a polyglot, for whom the secrets of a language serve as a means of communication between the different languages ​​she has experienced throughout her life.

Born to a Jewish mother and a Belgian father, Monique spent her early childhood in the then very bourgeois 16th arrondissement of Paris, in an environment known as Jewish-Passy. Monique recounts, with a touch of humor, the conversations between her mother and her friends about their fashionable psychoanalysis sessions. Without any hint of irony, she recounts her conversations with her grandparents' Czech chauffeur about her father's love affairs...

A student at a Catholic school, Monique is baptized and makes her first communion. Under the pretext of learning languages, German in this case, her father settles her in the Ruhr, where he works. The anti-Semitic climate is growing: Monique is entrusted to the Belgian consulate in Cologne. In the spring of 1939, the family settles in Germany because of a contract her father had signed. War with France is declared on September 1. Her mother leaves for Brussels with her two children, but her father takes them to Düsseldorf, where he is imprisoned on May 10, 1940, for six months. To escape the bombings, they emigrate to the border with Luxembourg, where Monique completes her high school… in German!

A medical student, she worked as an intern at Weimar Hospital, where, at the age of 18, she assisted in painful amputations without anesthesia.

Monique admits to holding a grudge against her father, guilty of exposing her family to the Nazi threat. A grudge, like Pedro Páramo's, lingers despite the passing of the years.

In 1946, they embarked for the United States. They returned to Paris the following year, where Clara Malraux introduced her to the Jolas family. This was followed by an endless series of encounters with the figures who populated the 20th century: the Batailles, the Lacans, the Duthuis, Rose and André Masson, Miró, Marie-Louise de Noailles, and the Prévert brothers.

In September 1949, during a dinner at the Lacans' home, attended by Balthus, Monique met Claude Lévi-Strauss. The ethnologist, a student of myths he sought to decipher, asked Lacan if he knew anyone who could correct the galley proofs of an English book. The psychoanalyst replied, "You are sitting next to the person who would do it perfectly ," that is, Monique. Thus began the working sessions at the Musée de l'Homme, of which he was deputy director.

There is no shortage of spicy anecdotes about characters: René Char had four lovers at the same time, like his friend Camus, which took up time in correspondence and saliva in stamps . From his work as an ethnologist: In cannibalism, you will see a mode of nutrition that prevents the flesh from rotting when burial is not practiced .

Of the Musée du Quai Branly, created by Jacques Chirac, Monique says: “The amphitheater bears Claude's name, but it's the library where his books are kept that mattered to him. He said: 'What counts for me is being printed. Something will remain of what I've done if my books are preserved in libraries.'”

What memory is less perishable than the one that is written down?

[email protected]