Desert (1980), by J M G Le Clezio, Translated by C. Dickson

 

Reading Desert, by J.M.G. Le Clézio is a vivid experience.   The citation for Le Clézio's Nobel Prize reads that he is an 'author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization', and this is certainly true of Desert.

As I said when I posted a Sensational Snippet from the novel, it is a strange, hypnotic work,  depicting the lives of a nomadic desert people whose way of life was disrupted by colonial invaders.  It chronicles exile, new beginnings, and the fragility of a displaced nomadic tribe, the Tuaregs a.k.a. the Blue People, and it does so in language and a novel structure that mirrors the experiences of a civilisation uprooted by French colonisation in North Africa.  It is incredibly sensual: Le Clézio brings the desert to life with light and colour and a sense of the sands and winds as living beings.

There are two narratives: the book begins with Nour in 1909 as he begins a long, cruel and ultimately pointless pilgrimage towards safety.  Expelled from their homelands, the tribe is guided by their spiritual leader to the north, where they hope to find both a new home and protection.  On this epic journey, the desert is malicious.  The sun burns; the sand and winds shred clothes and skin; and hunger and thirst gnaw at survival, at hope, and at the individual's sense of humanity:

The first time Nour saw someone fall by the side of the trail without a sound, he wanted to stop, but the blue warriors and those who were walking with him pushed him onward, not saying anything because there was nothing else to do.  Now Nour no longer stopped.   Sometimes there would be the shape of a body in the dust, arms and legs drawn in, as if it were asleep.  It was an old man, or an old woman, that the pain and exhaustion had stopped there, by the side of the trail, struck in the back of the head as if with a hammer, the body already desiccated.  The blowing wind would throw handfuls of sand over it, would soon cover it over, without anyone having to dig a grave. (p. 188)
[Note, by the way, that carefully-placed comma between 'old man' and 'old woman', forcing the reader to pause momentarily in order for the magnitude of these unmarked deaths to sink in].

Generations later, in the second narrative, Lalla's desert is benign.  An orphaned descendant of the remnants of Nour's tribe, she is blithe despite the deprivations of her shantytown home in the Project, a refugee camp stuck out in barren coastal Morocco.  Lalla is at home here: she cherishes the changing light, the shifting sands, and the scraps of wildlife that share her environment: an occasional snake, flies and wasps.  Le Clézio does not romanticise the joys of her life: he is making the point that this child has never known anything else and takes pleasure in whatever comes her way.  She is wild and wilful, and with her friend The Hartani, she explores places known only to him.  He is a deaf-mute considered to be possessed by a djinn but the children communicate wordlessly.  They have a spiritual connection nurtured by their love of the natural environment, such as it is.

But for girls, even those as young as Lalla, the future means being married off and Aamma her aunt organises a potential suitor.  This is intolerable to Lalla, and she runs away, eventually making her way to Marseilles.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

Marseilles turns out to be an emotional desert for Lalla.  Le Clézio demolishes the dreams of refugees the world over: the refugee experience is bleak and harsh, embedded in poverty both real and spiritual.

The train station is also one of the places where you can see without being seen, because there is too much agitation and hurriedness to pay much attention to anyone.  There are all sorts of people in the station, cruel people, violent people with bright red faces, people who shout at the top of their lungs; there are very sad and very poor people too, old people who are lost, anxiously searching for the platforms their trains are leaving from, women with too many children who hobble along with their loads by the cars that are too high.  There are all of the people that poverty has brought to this city, blacks who have come off boats, heading for the cold countries with their colourful short-sleeved shirts and a lone beach bag serving as luggage; dark-skinned North Africans, layered with old jackets, wearing ski caps of hats with ear flaps; the Turks, the Spaniards, the Greeks, all looking worried and weary, wandering around on the platforms in the wind, bumping into one another in the midst of the crowd of indifferent travellers and jeering soldiers.

Lalla watches them, just barely hidden between the telephone booth and the information board.  She's backed into the shadows pretty well, and her copper-coloured face is shielded with the collar of her coat.  But from time to time, her heart starts beating faster and a flash of light darts from her eyes, like the reflection of the sun off the stones in the desert.  She watches all the people who are headed for other cities, for hunger, cold, misfortune, those who will be humiliated, who will live in solitude.  They go by, stooping slightly, eyes black, clothing already worn from nights of sleeping on the ground, like so many defeated soldiers. 

 They are headed for black cities, for low skies, for smoke-stacks, for the cold, the sickness that rips your chest apart.  They're headed for their shantytowns in muddy lots, down below the freeways, for rooms like graves dug into the ground, surrounded by high walls and fences.  Maybe those men, those women, passing by like ghosts, dragging their bags and their too-heavy children, will never come back, maybe they'll die in those countries they don't even know, far from their villages, far from their families?  They're headed into those foreign countries that will take their lives, crush and devour them.  (p. 216-7)

Lalla rejects Aunt Aamma's attempt to find work for her (see the Sensational Snippet); her pride and her independence will not allow her to submit to or to witness exploitation or cruelty.  Aged only seventeen and pregnant, she walks the back streets of Marseilles by night, blending into the shadows to avoid notice, and working in a filthy hotel on subsistence wages.  But Lalla doesn't understand money or possessions: her nomadic inheritance is ever-present and she gives away what she does not immediately need.  She longs for the vastness of her childhood:

She would so like to go away from here, walk through the streets of the city until there were no more houses, no more gardens, not even any roads, or shoreline, just a path like before, that would lead out, growing ever narrower till it reached the desert. (p. 217)

The language swirls about, mimicking the undulations of a desert landscape.  Le Clézio achieves this with paragraphs that build in intensity, repeating phrases that describe the emptiness,  modifying them, blurring them and occasionally flicking into them some small discordant event like the bite of a wasp or a brief lashing of sand blown by the wind.  It is mesmerizing and seductive, and the reader has to keep searching for small details that advance the plot, much like the nomad seeking almost imperceptible shifts in landscape that guide him through a desert landscape that hides its secrets.  It is easy to be lured into a kind of lassitude,  an endlessness of days all the same, and lives on hold.  It is almost has if the reader has to fight against the hypnotic text, to remind herself that there are characters for whom time is moving on and what will become of them?

Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008. When in the wake of the prize publicity I bought his Wandering Star there wasn't much to choose from, but now there is a wealth of English translations of his books.

Highly recommended.

Author: J.M.G. Le Clézio
Title: Desert
Translated from the French by C. Dickson
Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2009, first published in 1980 as Desert by Editions Gallimard, Paris
ISBN: 9781848873803
Source: Personal library

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers

 

 

Desert by Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

France has seen quite some of her writers rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature: René F. A. Sully Prudhomme (1901), Frédéric Mistral (1904), Romain Rolland (1915), Anatole France (1921), Henri Bergson (1927), Roger Martin du Gard (1937), André Gide (1947), François Mauriac (1952), Albert Camus (1957), Saint-John Perse (1960), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), Claude Simon (1985), Gao Xingjian (2000), and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008). Their names are stars twinkling in the literary sky although some have become hard to make out in the growing haze of the years. However, it would almost feel like a sacrilege to ignore them all in the Books on France 2014 reading challenge, so I decided to review at least one work by a French Nobel laureate. My choice fell upon Desert by J.-M. G. Le Clézio. 

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in Nice, France, in April 1940, but his ancestors had been living on the island of Mauritius since the late eighteenth century. He began writing as a seven-year-old and already in 1963 his first published novel, The Interrogation (Le Procès-Verbal), earned him a renowned literary award, the Prix Renaudot. In the following decades he finished his studies, travelled extensively and worked as a professor at different universities along with producing several important novels like The Flood (Le déluge: 1966), Terra amata (1967), The Book of Flights (Le Livre des fuites: 1969), War (La Guerre: 1970), and The Giants (Les Géants: 1973). As from the late 1970s J.-M. G. Le Clézio’s style changed and his books began to attract a wider public. Some of his most notable later works available in English are Desert (Désert: 1980), The Prospector (Le Chercheur d'or: 1985), Onitsha (1991), Wandering Star (Étoile errante: 1992), and The African (L’Africain: 2004). In 2008 the French-Mauritian writer of novels, short stories, essays and also some children’s books was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His latest published novel is Ritournelle de la faim (2008) and not yet translated into English. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, Mauritius, and Nice, France, with his family. 

The impressive scenes of Desert are Morocco or Western Sahara and Marseille, France, alternately in 1909/10 and in modern times, probably the period when the novel was conceived in the 1970s. The two plot lines are interlaced and linked in various ways. One such connection is the desert itself and the deep love for it which share the Tuareg teenager Nour and the orphan girl Lalla Hawa although about sixty years separate their stories. Another common point is the Blue Man, a wonder-working man of the Tuareg people and maternal ancestor of Lalla Hawa. In the early twentieth century the desert warriors under their aged leader Sheikh Ma Al-Ainine, who was a disciple of the Blue Man, stand up against the Christian (colonial) army. They set out to chase the Infidels from their beloved country in the name and with the help of Allah. Nour and his family are among the track of men, women, children and livestock struggling northwards through the desert regardless of heat, cold, thirst, hunger, and exhaustion. In the 1970s their descendant Lalla Hawa lives with her aunt’s family in some shanty town at the Atlantic coast where the dunes of the desert end. It’s her greatest pleasure to roam the beach and the dunes to observe the sea, the animals and the plants in solitude or to meet her mute shepherd friend, a foundling called “the Hatani”, on the stony pastures although she is ever again warned against seeing the boy. Lalla grows up to be a young woman in a poor neighbourhood without other “schooling” than that of household routine and the stories which the old fisherman Naman and her aunt keep telling, but she doesn’t mind since her nomadic soul only longs for freedom. She is happy. When her aunt arranges a marriage for her with a wealthy middle-aged man from the city, Lalla flees into the desert with the Hatani and counts on being no longer a suitable match for any honourable man, especially if she got pregnant. Half dead with thirst and hunger Lalla is rescued and when she has enough recovered, she joins her aunt who meanwhile went to Marseille. Alas, nothing there is the way she had expected and she misses the desert. Only when a photographer notices the beautiful seventeen-year-old, fate turns in her favour.

The stories of Nour and Lalla are filled with the spirit of the Desert which – of course – accounts for the novel’s title. The protagonists move about in a world of beauty and frugality, of secret and magic, of life and death which J.-M. G. Le Clézio describes in countless poetic pictures. The protagonists are fully aware of their surroundings and see things that nobody else, above all no European, might notice or even appreciate. They love the desert no matter how hard it is to survive in such a harsh environment and they belong to it. For Lalla emigration is no rescue from misery, but imprisonment. The pace of the novel is slow like that of a caravan making its way through the desert under a merciless sun. Time is of no importance. The novel is written in a simple language which made it easy for me to read the French original.

Desert by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio may not be a novel to everybody’s taste, but I loved it. I feel that there is much more in it than I could grasp reading it only once and rather quickly. It goes without saying that I warmly recommend this novel.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2014/03/desert-by-j-m-g-le-clezio.html

The African by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

(French Title: L'Africain) - 2004

Reviewed by Marianne from "Let's Read"

The French Nobel prize winner wrote this an autobiographical essay mainly about his childhood in Africa where he met his father who spent most of his life there. A good description of the African landscape and not only an autobiography about the author but also about his father whom he got to know as a stranger.

With this book, he seems to want to get closer to a father he never got to know well during this youth. His way to his father is over his beloved Africa, a continent that has formed his childhood. He shows this best in this quote: "I am forever yearning to go back to Africa, to my childhood memory. To the source of my feelings, to that which molded my character."

Wonderful writing, I'm not surprised he was a Nobel laureate. An author who truly deserves this recognition.

This will not be the last book I have read by J.M.G. Le Clézio.

From the back cover:
"The African is a short autobiographical account of a pivotal moment in Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clézio's childhood. In 1948, young Le Clézio, with his mother and brother, left behind a still-devastated Europe to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he'd been separated by the war. In Le Clézio's characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the narrative relates both the dazzled enthusiasm the child feels at discovering newfound freedom in the African savannah and his torment at discovering the rigid authoritarian nature of his father. The power and beauty of the book reside in the fact that both discoveries occur simultaneously.

While primarily a memoir of the author's boyhood, The African is also Le Clézio's attempt to pay a belated homage to the man he met for the first time in Africa at age eight and was never quite able to love or accept. His reflections on the nature of his relationship to his father become a chapeau bas to the adventurous military."


Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization", received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.

Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio (Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers)

I’ve had a mixed experience with Nobel Prize winners that I’ve recently read. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek was challenging to say the least, and Auto-da-Fe by Elias Canetti was bizarre. On the other hand, Beloved by Toni Morrison was a revelation, and The Double by José Saramago was very entertaining. But Wandering Star aroused intense feelings of melancholy about the Arab-Israeli conflict and of anger about international indifference to the persisting plight of refugees all over the world.
J.M.G. Le Clézio was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature as an ‘author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization’ – and I bought Wandering Star, the only one of his books available in English, shortly afterwards. Now that I’ve finally read it, I understand why he won the prize.
Alison Kelly’s review at The Guardian explains that Le Clezio wrote experimental fiction in his first phase as an author, but that Wandering Star reverts to using ‘conventional modes of storytelling complete with familiar devices such as characters, settings and plots’. Since I haven’t read any of his unconventional works, I can’t comment on the full scope of this author, but (despite the pedestrian translation) this book shows a writer in great command of his powers. In this novel he has tackled that most intractable of geopolitical issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the point of view of two young girls, both of whom are ‘wandering stars’ in search of a home. Esther is a Jewish refugee in post-Holocaust Europe, and Nejma is a dispossessed Palestinian. Their parallel stories illuminate the anguish of exile.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/07/10/wandering-star-by-j-m-g-le-clezio/

The 2008 Nobel Prize winner is ...

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio ... "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization"