Desert. J.M.G. Le Clzio - Softcover

J.M.G. Le Clézio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848873816 ISBN 13: 9781848873810

Publisher: Atlantic, 2011

Synopsis

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's tribe - the Blue Men - are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men - a girl called Lalla - is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe - and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life - as a hotel maid - and the material prosperity of those who succeed - when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors. In these two narratives set in counterpoint, Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. G. Le Clezio tells - powerfully and movingly - the story of the 'last free men' and of Europe's colonial legacy - a story of war and exile and of the endurance of the human spirit.

About this title

About the Author

J. M. G. Le Clezio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice and was educated at the University College of Nice and at Bristol and London universities. Since publication of his first novel, Le Proces verbal (The Interrogation), he has written over forty highly acclaimed books, while his work has been translated into thirty-six languages. He divides his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), New Mexico and Mauritius. In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Review

Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clezio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. --Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times (8/30/2009)

One of the few works by 2008 Nobel laureate Le Clezio to be translated into English, this mythic novel tells two parallel stories of descendants of a holy man called Al Azraq. The novel begins with Nour, a Berber boy who bears witness to the failed rebellion led by Sheik Ma el Ainine against the French in the years leading up to WWI. In the cadences of an incantation, Le Clezio renders the dire suffering of the displaced desert peoples who turn to Ma el Ainine for guidance. The parallel story, set in the near-contemporary, portrays Lalla, a young woman who lives on the Moroccan coast and spends her days exploring the seashore and listening to the stories of her aunt and the fisherman Old Naman. After escaping an arranged marriage, Lalla lands in Marseille and finds not the gleaming white city of Naman's stories but a cruel place cut off from nature. Le Clezio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing. --Publisher's Weekly

This work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants. The main character, the Algerian guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society. --from the Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy

When French writer Le Clezio was presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, the response of many Americans was, Who? That's because so few of his stunning works have been translated into English, including this 1980 fever dream of a novel about earth and spirit, war and exile. In poetic language at once piercingly realistic and rhapsodically supernatural, Le Clezio tells the dramatic stories of two mystical, resilient children of the North African desert, members of a nomadic tribe of warriors. Nour endures a horrific forced march across the desert just prior to World War I, as French soldiers invade and a holy sheik struggles to keep the planet s last free people free. Decades later, Lalla, a shantytown seer channeling the hidden life force of the forbidding desert, is forced to flee Morocco for Marseilles, where she witnesses the misery of other despised immigrants. In scenes of shimmering intensity, Le Clezio contrasts nature s stark and majestic clarity, from scouring sand to the incinerating sun and the vast gleaming net of stars, with the chaos, toxicity, and injustice of human life. A long time coming for English-language readers, Le Clezio s incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant. --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. --Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times (8/30/2009)

About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1848873816
• ISBN 13: 9781848873810
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352