This review is taken from the TLS of Friday August 10, 2007.

BALLACINER. By J. M. G. Le Clézio. 182pp. Gallimard. Euro 18.50. 978 2 07 078484 4.

The idiosyncratic fiction of the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio has been most often associated with the nomadic author's interest in travel and immersion in other cultures. But Le Clézio is also a self-declared cinephile, whose fascination for cinema has always gone hand in hand with his love of literature.

Continuous with his 1987 essay "La Magie du cinema", in which the novelist defined film as a glimpse of another world, Ballaciner is a suggestive and intensely personal meditation retracing the novelist's love affair with the seventh art.

The narrative begins in childhood, with a Proustian initiation into the world of images, as the static scenes of Le Clézio's grandmother's magic lantern are replaced by moving images – most memorably those of Harold Lloyd's Haunted Spooks projected by the Pathe Baby she acquires to entertain her grandchildren. But Ballaciner is also a foreshortened history of cinema itself, from the first films of the Lumiere brothers to explorations of contemporary cinema from India, Iran and Korea, including an interview with Park Chan-wook (director of Old Boy and Lady Vengeance).

Throughout, reflections on the nature of film, its relationship with literature, its power of incantation and synaesthesia, and its political significance are interwoven with personal anecdotes. Shifting from the rowing boat in Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu monogatari to the barge in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, from the raging storm in Antonioni's L'Avventura to the crash of the ocean in Breaking the Waves by Lars van Trier, Le Clézio's meandering and nostalgic journey also evokes vivid memories of his youth in Nice, set against the troubled background of the Algerian war.

Meanwhile, this is – perhaps unsurprisingly for such an internationalist writer – a story of travels, actual journeys inspired by the love of cinema (a pilgrimage to Ozu's room in Chigasaki) and those experienced in the darkness of the auditorium when transported by a film. A portrait of a cultural sensibility shaped by the 1950s, Ballaciner (Le Clézio's portmanteau of ballade and cine) offers penetrating analyses of some of the "disturbing, unforgettable dreams" conjured up on the cinema screen.

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