This review is taken from the TLS of April 21, 2006.
OURANIA. By J. M. G. Le Clezio. 297pp. Paris: Gallimard. Euro 19.50. 2 07
077703 0
For over four decades now, since the publication of Le Proces-verbal (The
Interrogation) in 1963, J. M. G. Le Clezio has been creating a distinctive
body of work: some thirty books -novels, collections of short stories,
philosophical essays, and translations (there have also been several books
for children). A bestselling author in France, he has tended to avoid the
Parisian literary establishment, preferring to make his home in Nice (where
he was born in 1940), or Mexico, where, for a period in the 1980s, he lived
in a village at the foot of a volcano. His fiction is characterized by a
preoccupation with outsiders -adventurers on a quest, misfits, the
deracinated and the dispossessed of the Third World. While Le Clezio's
output is undoubtedly uneven in quality, it is hard to deny the seriousness
of his engagement with the world (we are a long way from the weary nihilism
of Michel Houellebecq) and particularly, as his career has developed, with
the world beyond European shores.
Le Proces-verbal, a remarkably confident and original debut, still reads well.
The novel chronicles random episodes in the life, as well as the extreme
states of mind, of a young man, Adam Pollo, adrift in an unnamed French
Mediterranean city that is nevertheless un- mistakably Nice. Pollo, who may
be an army deserter or a psychiatric patient on the loose, lives on his own
in an unoccupied house at the top of the town; he has severed ties with his
anxious parents and has a strange relationship with a girl he meets on the
beach - at one point, they discuss metaphysics while lying on a billiard
table.
Typographic innovations (words crossed out; the reproduction of pages from the
local newspaper carrying a report on Pollo's admission to a psychiatric
hospital after he had addressed a crowd in an agitated manner) point to a
writer experimenting with form.
The sense of a fierce intelligence getting to grips with the banalities of
everyday life is again evident in the collection of stories La Fievre
(1965), while in works such as Le Deluge (1966) and La Guerre (1970) Le
Clezio tackles the theme of alienation in an increasingly mechanized urban
environment. The meditations Le Livre des fuites (1969) and Voyages de
l'autre cote (1975) hint at the semi-nomadic instincts of the much-travelled
author, who first signalled his serious interest in Meso-American and
Mexican culture, in 1976, by bringing out a translation into French of
fragments of Mayan chronicles, Les Propheties du Chilam Balam. Trois Villes
saintes, a barely readable exercise in psychogeography, followed in 1980,
and a lengthy study of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (Diego et Frida) in
1993.
Le Clezio received the Academie Francaise's Grand Prix Paul Morand in 1980 for
Desert, a novel that revealed a move towards a more expansive and lyrical
style. The book has a dual narrative. The first, dated 1909–10, chronicles
the tragic fate of a Tuareg clan fleeing across Morocco from their French
and Spanish colonial oppressors ("les Chretiens"). There are fine
evocations of the unforgiving desert: "They crossed the mountains for
days. The burning wind blew in the ravines. The blue sky was immense above
the red rocks. There was no one here, neither man nor beast, just
occasionally the trace of a serpent in the sand, or, very high up in the
sky, the shadow of a vulture". The second narrative follows Lalla, a
beautiful, fearless, young Moroccan girl who lands in an intimidating
Marseilles, where she endures abuse and hardship before being taken up by a
fashion photographer. As in Poisson d'or (1997), the story of a young girl's
odyssey from Morocco to Los Angeles, Le Clezio's imaginative empathy is put
to good effect.
Mauritius and the neighbouring island of Rodrigues provide the setting for one
of the author's most engaging novels, Le Chercheur d'or (1985; published in
English some ten years later as The Prospector), a book notable for its
evocation of the lush vegetation of the islands, its seafaring passages and
descriptions of the devastating effects of storms. It spans three decades,
from the 1890s to the 1920s, in the life of its narrator, Alexis, who is
eight years old when he watches his father's failed attempts to modernize
sugar-cane production bankrupt him. As war breaks out in Europe, Alexis goes
off willingly to fight in the trenches, survives and returns to resume his
love affair with the "manaf" girl, Ouma, who teaches him how to
live outside "civilized" society, and continue his search for the
gold which, family documents assure him, is buried on Rodrigues. A fanciful
device perhaps, but the story would appear to have some basis in the
author's own ancestry.
Le Clezio's family were originally from the Morbihan on the west coast of
Brittany. At the time of the Revolution, one of his ancestors, who had
refused to enlist in the Revolutionary Army because they had insisted he cut
his long hair, fled France with the intention of reaching India, but
disembarked on Mauritius, and stayed there. Le Clezio regards himself as
Franco-Mauritian. In a beautifully measured memoir of his father, L'Africain
(2004), the author describes how, after spending two years as a doctor in
British Guiana (having been born on Mauritius, he held British nationality
and, indeed, completed his medical studies at a London teaching hospital),
his father took a medical posting on the remote border of Nigeria and
Cameroon in 1928, where he remained for over twenty years, dedicating
himself selflessly to his work. His wife and two young sons stayed in France
through the Second World War, and when he trekked north in an attempt to
join them he was turned back near Algiers.
Jean-Marie Le Clezio was eight when he, his mother and his brother finally
joined his father in the province of Ogoja in Nigeria. Le Clezio thinks
that, on their first meeting, his father may have been wearing pince-nez,
which, he later decided, helped lend him a resemblance to James Joyce (one
of Le Clezio's two favourite authors, with Robert Louis Stevenson). Of their
time there, which would furnish material for the excellent novel Onitsha
(1991), Le Clezio writes:
My brother and I were the only white children in the whole region. We knew
nothing of what went into creating the slightly caricatural identity of
children raised in the "colonies". When I read the "colonial"
novels written by the English of the period, or of the time before our
arrival in Nigeria – Joyce Cary, for example – I don't recognize anything.
When I read William Boyd, who also spent part of his childhood in British
West Africa, I don't recognize anything either.
It was a time of "almost dangerous" freedom (there was no formal
schooling) "between the sadness of the South of France during the war
and the sadness of the end of my childhood in Nice in the 1950s". The
steady disillusionment of his father as he fights a solitary and losing
battle against disease (we read a harrowing account of a boy's death from
rabies) drives him to outbreaks of domestic violence, and a mute,
disappointed existence back in France.
Le Clezio had already appeared to be responding to an autobiographical impulse
in Revolutions, the hugely impressive novel he published in 2003. A 550-page
epic that never flags, it chronicles the adolescence and early adulthood of
Jean Marro.
We accompany Jean through his turbulent years at the lycee in an unnamed
French Mediterranean town that is, again, recognizably Nice. In a manner
that brings to mind the late Claude Simon's great novel of shifting
historical time frames, Les Georgiques, which also refers back to the
Revolutionary period, Le Clezio weaves into the narrative the story of
Jean's ancestor, who fought against the Austrians and Prussians before
sailing to Mauritius to escape the poverty of post-Revolutionary France.
More recent history is also touched on in the form of the Algerian War,
which has a devastating impact on the lives of Jean's peers, and he
witnesses the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1968.
Le Clezio's new novel, Ourania, is partly set in a Utopian community on the
Pacific coast of Mexico. The "republic" of Campos was set up in
the 1980s in an abandoned Jesuit seminary. We learn about it through one of
its inhabitants, Raphael, a sixteen-year-old Inuit and the son of an
alcoholic father; the children don't attend formal school: instead, they
spend mornings working the land and afternoons in study and "dialogue";
they receive sex education, without being encouraged to practise it
themselves; organized religion is frowned on and the exchange of money
forbidden. Many of the children in Campos have been abandoned by their
parents. Nearby is the Emporio, a research centre with high humanist ideals,
for anthropologists and social scientists, set up by the idealistic Thomas
Moises. We visit it in the company of Daniel Sillitoe, a young French
geographer from Paris who has come as a guest of Moises in order to survey
the remote Tepalcatepec valley. The Emporio is failing to live up to its
founder's aspirations, not least because the visiting academics, who have
come from all over Latin America, appear contemptuous of the local
population and take a hostile view of Sillitoe's project: "As a
Frenchman, and a geographer, I was condemned to isolation. Anthropology was
unquestionably the queen of the social sciences. The study of (geological)
folds and rocks, or even the pedological map of the Tepalcatepec valley . .
. . What use could that be?" They also appear unconcerned about the
plight of the "Parachutistes", a group of fifty or so homeless
families who have been allowed to set up camp in the valley, as unwitting
pawns in a plot devised by corrupt developers who intend to take possession
of the land.
The reader is intended to draw parallels between the two "idealist"
communities, but it is hard to see to what purpose. We are left with an
over-schematic and unconvincing novel. As always with Le Clezio, the writing
is wonderfully limpid and there are some superb descriptive passages – among
them, the evening ritual of four-wheel drives parading around the colonial
plaza of the local town as the strawberry and avocado farmers display their
wealth -but this is not enough to compensate for a lack of narrative focus.
Le Clezio has talked of writing being a search for equilibrium: "a bit
like riding a bike, I write with the idea that you have to go forward in
order not to fall off". Here he appears to have fallen off. The novel
received surprisingly favourable reviews on its recent publication in
France, where Le Clezio has a reputation that has prompted talk of a
possible Nobel Prize. Sadly, in Britain he is now all but unknown (although
his early fiction was translated into English, at a time when there was
greater interest in literary developments across the Channel). A translation
of Revolutions would go a long way to putting things right.
Your Comments
Order By: