J. M. G. Le Clézio

Le Clezio's world is far from cosy. The words 'void' and 'abyss' occur with frequency and violence is never far away. It's ostensibly a tale of a life at intermittent stages between birth and death but encompasses all sentient life at it's most essential level as in the best existential lit. It's pretty hopeless in tone but the description of life in all its variety and abundance does at least afford it a positive. Le Clezio was ambitious around this time and this one especially seems like show more he was making a kind of ultimate statement on existence. Man and the swarms of ants (a recurring image) ultimately share the same fate though. It's an impressive work and I'll very likely re-read and probably soon. show less

Not a conventional novel so much as a series of prose poems/essays linked together on a theme, which is the concept of war stretched to encompass all aspects of life. Everything, from the light of a lightbulb to motorway traffic, expands to become an assault on the senses, a constant attack from which no peaceful escape or respite is possible. One effect of this is to make war normal and so ineradicable, to show it as sewn into every moment of life. There is no plot of any kind, and no show more characters, with only a couple of recurring, virtually anonymous figures (Bea B. and Monsieur X) cropping up fairly regularly. I enjoyed this. I found that I faded in and out of it a little, but the parts that grabbed me were excellent, there was some superb writing, a lot of real insight and humour too. For an ostensibly difficult book it was easy to read, and entertaining. 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

Loosely based on Le Clézio's grandfather, the narrator of this novel, Alexis, grows up on a cane plantation in Mauritius in the 1890s. After the family fortunes are destroyed by a hurricane, Alexis follows his father's unrealised dream of searching for pirate treasure on Rodrigues island. Naturally enough, it doesn't turn out to be a simple matter of yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, the treasure resolves itself into something more complicated and symbolic, and along the way Alexis has to show more confront the evils of colonialism, the horrors of the First World War, and a curiously innocent relationship with a (possibly imaginary) young woman, Ouma.

More than anything else, this seems to be a book in which the narrator's experience of the natural world around him — the tropical landscape of Mauritius and Rodrigues, the Indian Ocean, the night sky, even the shell-blasted mud of Flanders — is forever taking over from any merely human interactions and pushing them into the background. It's all very beautiful, you can really lose yourself in the descriptive passages, but on stepping back a little you do have to keep wondering about the selfishness of this man who can lose himself in contemplation of rocks, trees and stars and forget all about his sister, mother and girlfriend for dozens of pages at a time. show less