J. M. G. Le Clézio

Despite the lovely writing and imagery of Mautitius and its ocean in the opening sections, I had trouble getting in to this; I was bored. But then on page 14 of my copy Le Clézio writes: “Everything I felt and everything I saw seemed eternal. I did not know that soon all of it would be gone.” And that’s all it took to get me engaged through the end—through the narrator’s childhood experiences on Mauritius, his travels around the Indian Ocean islands, his long search for a lost show more treasure on an unnamed island (Rodrigues), and his somehow, for me, anti-climatic WWI experiences.

I guess this in epic of sorts, without much a plot. We simply follow Alexis through his life and his continued search. His childhood serves as a mystical golden age, highlighted by a magically described natural world which he explores with Denis, a black descendant of escaped slaves, and Laure, his older sister. This life is abruptly halted when a typhoon ruins his father’s ongoing project in which he invested everything. Alexis is unable to come to terms with the change, and unable to live a normal life. So, his long search for treasure serves a purpose much different than a search for wealth. He is looking within himself, looking for the self he once was, and trying to find something that simply isn’t and can never be there—namely his past.

Having ensnared me early on, Le Clézio could do no wrong. I rolled along the ocean waves with Alexis, explored the wondrous islands with him, searched for his treasure and loved the whole thing. He simply took me away with him.

2010
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When Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back, I was fascinated to discover that he had written a book set partly in the Western Sahara, which is indeed where his story starts and ends, following an uprising of then indigenous people against the Europeans of 1910-11, told from the viewpoint of a young boy close to but not in the events. But more than half of the book, interwoven with the sections set earlier, is the story of show more Lalla, set perhaps in the early 1950s, following her from a shanty-town near the coast, with her unspeaking herdsman lover, to Marseilles and back. It is Marseilles that turns out to be the real human desert, full of alienation for Lalla; Nour's desert is a vibrant human space, full of physical and cultural significance. It would be interesting to read some critiques of this from sources nearer the region, but I very much enjoyed Le Clézio's turning round the questions of who is alien, what is normal, where is the real desert. show less

The 2008 Nobel Prize winner for literature was a complete surprise. I had never heard the name or any of his novels. I checked with a colleague from France, and she had heard of him but had read only one of his novels. Onitsha appears to be the only work translated into English.

The story tells of Maou and her son Fintan who travel to Nigeria to meet up with Geoffrey, Maou’s husband and Fintan’s father. They arrive as the British colonial system is collapsing – Nigeria is about to be show more plunged into civil war.

This marvelous novel has a couple of peculiar features which make it unique and absorbing. First, it is almost entirely told through description. The author limits dialogue to only a few lines at a time, and only on rare occasions. The description, on the other hand, is so rich it defies its own description. For example, when Fintan first sets foot in the village of Onitsha, he surveys the scene from the veranda of the family home. “At sunset the sky darkened to the west, towards Asaba, above Brokkedon Island. From the height of the terrace Fintan could survey the entire breadth of the river, could see places where the tributaries – Anambara, Omerun – joined the river, and the large flat island of Jersey, covered with reeds and trees. Downstream the river inscribed a slow curving line to the south, as vast as an arm of the sea, with the hesitant traces of small islands, like rafts adrift. The storm swirled. There were bloodied streaks in the sky, gaps in the clouds. Then very rapidly, the black cloud went back up the river, chasing before it the flying ibises still lit by the sun” (47).

Page after page the reader rides along the river in a pirogue, or walks through a grassy field, or struggles through jungle growth.

The other peculiarity involves Geoffrey’s obsession with a legend of a young queen of Meroë, who led her people to the interior of the continent to find a new land to begin their civilization anew. This portion of the story has been set into a slightly different font, and the legend becomes entangled with Geoffrey’s dreams.

The impassioned Maou causes trouble among the colonial community, and Geoffrey is forced to take his family back to Europe. They try and erase the memory of Onitsha, its people, myths, and the legend of Meroë, the last descendent of the Pharaohs. But too much of Africa and its legends has penetrated the family. It will remain with them forever.

LeClézio’s novel intertwines, colonialism, legends, and the destructive force of white invaders. I surely hope more of his work will find its way into English translations. I only hope a more professional publisher will pick up the task. This was a poorly printed, poorly bound book by The University of Nebraska Press. Five stars

--Jim, 12/24/08 show less

This book is an autobiographical sketch that is more than a sketch and it goes beyond an autobiography in a strict sense. The narration crosses over the starting point of the author's life and focuses on the story of another protagonist - the author's father, The African of the title. Then it is not really a biography of the father either, it is rather an attempt to understand this alien figure, almost an enemy, that was abruptly brought into the author's life at the endpoint of his show more childhood, at the point when memories are no longer lost but are amplified by life lying ahead.

The book starts with these vivid memories of a new place, arrival to Africa of plenty from Europe close to starvation, reunion of the family separated by the long years of war. The smells, the colors, the brightness and liberty of the open land are described in a lyrical tone of someone, whose life really started there and then and who later understood and cherished the significance of this moment. Yet, there is darkness and fear present at the same time - the father figure - an angry, pessimistic, irrationally restrictive and brutal person.

The story is transformed into an attempt to understand and explain this person, The African, whose ancestry was European, who was born on Mauritius and who hated colonialism with a passion that defined his life choices, that made him into who he was and led him to a breaking point, from which he was not able to recover.

After receiving his medical degree, The African flees the conformist and stifling society of England to set his foot in Africa for the first time. He detests the colonial culture on the coast of Nigeria and departs inland. He becomes the only doctor in a vast territory of Banso in the mountains of Cameroon. There, together with his wife, he spends the happiest years of his life, filled with meaning and challenge, offering help to those who could not have been helped before.

The birth of children in Europe leads to a presumably short separation that is extended indefinitely by the war. The bitterness takes place of happiness and with it comes the realisation that he himself, an open critic and hater of the colonial policies, is one of those who propagate these policies with his work, who serves on the humanitarian frontlines only to reinforce the inevitable arrival of subjugators and profiteers. From this breaking point, from this loss of meaning he cannot recover, what survives is only a shell of a human being. show less