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Sergio Kokis. Le pavilion des miroirs. La Tour d'Aigues, Fr. L'Aube. I999. 334 pages. '4o F. ISBN 2-87678467-X.
Originally published in 1994 in Montreal, Sergio Kokis's award-winning novel Le pavilion des miroirs alternates between Brazil, where the first-person narrator recounts his life in the present tense from childhood to young adulthood, and Canada, to which he emigrates and becomes a painter. The book explores his memory in order to understand who he is, since, to survive, he must reconcile such antipodal cultures and experiences.
The narrator's earliest remembrance occurs when he is five and deals with sex, which is all around him, for his mother runs a maison de rendez-vous. Furthermore, he is particularly open to all forms of sensual stimuli, whether these originate in the fervent adoration of Catholic saints, the animistic, carnivalesque cult...