The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts - Hardcover

Le Clezio, J.M.G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803229461 ISBN 13: 9780803229464

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Synopsis

Set largely in locations near the French Riviera, these eleven short stories depict the harsh realities of life for the less-privileged inhabitants of this very privileged region. Distinguished French writer J. M. G. Le Clézio lends his voice to the dispossessed and explores his familiar themes of alienation, immigration, poverty, violence, indifference, the loss of beauty, and the betrayal of innocence.

In one story an adolescent girl encounters the violence of a gang of masked bikers in a hostile and desolate housing project. In others a man stands by helplessly as a place of great beauty and deep childhood memory is slowly consumed and destroyed by a quickly developing city, an illegal immigrant desperate for work finds himself the prisoner of a ring trafficking in human beings, and two girls risk everything by running away from home and their dead-end factory jobs in search of a more meaningful life. At once tragic and evocative, these engrossing and beautifully crafted stories touch upon the loss of human values in a rapidly changing world.

About this title

About the Author

Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio was born in Nice in 1940 and is one of France’s best-known contemporary writers. He has published more than thirty novels and nonfiction works. In the course of the last four decades Le Clézio has won numerous prizes, including the Prix Renaudot for his first novel. His works have been translated into many languages.

C. Dickson is a translator living in France. Her translations include Shams Nadir's The Astrolabe of the Sea and Mohammad Dib's The Savage Night (Nebraska 2001).

From Booklist

Le Clezio, a distinguished French writer with 20 novels to his credit, including The Prospector (1993), writes moody and menacing short stories set in a fallen universe. Once a verdant paradise, Le Clezio's world has been brutalized with hideous concrete high-rise projects, heavy traffic, and pollution, and most adults hide in cell-like apartments bathed in television's narcotic blue glow. But the young are restless and reckless, and they pay dearly for their attempts at escape in "The Round," in which two teenage girls race their mopeds through their stodgy town at dangerously high speeds, and in "Ariadne," in which an urban adolescent, reluctant to be cooped up with her unhappy family, becomes prey to a motorcycle gang. Le Clezio is an intensely atmospheric, nearly hallucinatory writer, and in his riveting and eviscerating short stories, dreams turn inexorably into nightmares. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0803229461
• ISBN 13: 9780803229464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214