• Of all the litblogs I read, only The Literary Saloon seems to have been prepared to handle Le Clézio's Nobel victory. While the rest of us have been scratching our heads, The Literary Saloon has provided an informed reaction, quotations from book reviews, and a mountain of links.
• As the aforementioned blog pointed out, both the New York Times and the London Times have set up pages about the author. Each features reviews of Le Clézio's works pulled from their archives, and the former also has excerpts, worth reading, from Le Clézio's fiction. It seems that, even if virtually nobody in America or the UK knows much about Le Clézio now, his novels used to be reviewed in major publications by both countries: In 1964, even Time reviewed his debut (I wonder how long it's been since Time last devoted over 400 words to a French novel.)
• Someone at the Guardian has read Le Clézio's books and deems them "overdue for recognition."
From all this, I still haven't gleaned where I should start with Le Clézio. As far as I can tell, there's no consensus masterpiece, and it's hard to tell which of the five books available in English would work best as a starting point. None seems more important or more popular than any other. Should we wait for his earlier, more experimental novels to be reprinted, or will his "mature" period suffice? Of potential purchases, Onitsha interests me most, but is it really one of his best? Le Clézio has written over thirty books, and they can't all be winners. I gather, however, that he won major awards for The Interrogation and Désert: Does anyone have any idea when these will be republished?
We still need help here.
I think you need to dust off your Dearstyne-acquired skills and get to reading in the original...
Posted by: adyates | October 11, 2008 at 10:00 PM
Are you going to read Le Clezio author because you think he might be worth your time or are you just going to read him either
(a) to confirm that French literature stinks, or
(b) to confirm that the Nobel Prize for literature stinks?
Posted by: Roy | October 11, 2008 at 10:42 PM
Désert seems quite widely thought of as an acclaimed masterpiece, tackling French imperialism and its impact on the nomadic Tuareg tribes of Africa. A female model returns from Paris to have her child as far as I've been able to gather. The Academy's press release said, "Le Clezio made his breakthrough as a novelist with Desert in 1980, a work the academy said "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".
A review is over at http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=Lx9hLTnwRr8JbJxCGy5D0fbGN7CDCxJ8lnhkDYSJCGXbJs72gvT2!1187842857?docId=81015288
Posted by: ABB | October 12, 2008 at 05:10 AM
More publishing news here, not sure on l'Interogation, but Desert mentioned:
Two small independent American publishers are especially exuberant about the award: Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), which published Le Clézio's most recent book, WANDERING STAR -- a pair of connected stories of two young girls, one Jewish, one Palestinian -- and David R. Godine (Boston), who published the author's novel THE PROSPECTOR in 1993.
Publisher's Weekly told Godine's story about finding the work, saying that Godine has consistently asked European publishers for the names of their great writers whose work hasn't been available in English. Le Clézio was one of the names he received from Anne-Marie Solange at Gallimard. Out of his 1993 print run of six thousand copies, Godine was delighted to find he still had five hundred in stock at the time of the award announcement. Since then, he's also announced that he'll issue a paperback edition of THE PROSPECTOR and will publish another Le Clézio novel, DÉSERT, in English.
A third publisher racing to fill orders this week is the University of Nebraska Press, which is even shipping orders to Europe for two Le Clézio titles: ONITSHA (1997) and THE ROUND & OTHER COLD HARD FACTS (2002).
(Ref:http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/)
Posted by: ABB | October 12, 2008 at 05:16 AM
I'm pretty sure Madame Dearstyne herself couldn't actually read this sort of stuff in English.
Le Clezio may nevertheless be worth my time. I certainly don't think that French literature stinks. I'm not very familiar with it in its contemporary form, but France has produced a lot of authors I admire. The Nobel Prize does kind of stink, but it has honored great writers -- I don't mean just those in the distant past, like Faulkner and Camus, but also recent laureates such as Pinter and especially Coetzee. The prize doesn't guarantee that its recipient is any good, but we have to take our recommendations from somewhere, and the Nobel probably remains the loftiest recommendation around. Every year, one feels obligated to give the new winner a shot. For several of the latter-day laureates, I haven't gotten around to doing this yet, but they're on my list. I can't be bothered with the whole back catalog, though. I'll probably never read Verner von Heidenstam, and I doubt anything of his is in print in English anyway.
Posted by: Brett Yates | October 12, 2008 at 05:28 AM
Shit, Désert actually sounds kind of boring. But I guess that's still good news, ABB. Thanks. I'll probably read it when it's published.
Posted by: Brett Yates | October 12, 2008 at 05:37 AM