 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
J.M.G. Le Clézio (1940-) |
|
One of the most translated modern French authors, whose first novel appeared when he was only 23 years old. Due to his early experimentalist approach to novel, J.M.G. Le Clézio is counted among the avant-garde writers, but actually his work is difficult to pin down. Le Clézio's themes are cross-cultural. He moves freely, without restriction, from one continent to another, fusing ideas and images from different kinds of literature and culture. Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008. "They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thirst of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon; accompanying with them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccesible horizon." (Desert by J.M.G. Le Clézio, 2009, translated from the French by C. Dicson; originally published in French in 1980 as Désert) Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in Nice in 1940. Le Clézio's father, a Mauritian-born British medical officer, moved from England to British Guyana, and then to Nigeria. Before the family was reunited, he lived years in Africa – "my father was a bush doctor," Le Clézio said. His French mother also had a Mauritian background. His early childhood Le Clézio spent in Roquebillière, a small village near Nice. At the age of eight Le Clézio started to write poetry and read comics. In 1947 he traveled to Nigeria with his mother and brother, spending there a happy year without school. Later the author depicted his childhood in the semi-autobiographical novel Onitsha (1991), in which a young boy sails with his mother to Africa, where his English father is chasing his own dreams. Le Clézio was educated at schools in Nice, where his mother settled during the war. In 1957 Le Clézio passed his baccalauréat in literature and philosophy. He then studied at the Bristol University, at the University of London, and Institut d'Études Littéraires in Nice. In 1964 he received his M.A. from the University of Aix-en-Provence. Le Clézio obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Perpignan. In 1960 Le Clézio married Rosalie Piquemal, half-French, half-Polish; they had one daughter. After divorce Le Clézio remarried. His second wife, Jémia, was born in Morocco. From this marriage he also had a daughter. As a writer Le Clézio made his breakthrough with his first novel, Le procès-verbal (1963), which was awarded the Théophraste Renaudot Prize. The work introduced one of his central themes, the flight from commonly accepted ways of thought into extreme states of mind. Adam Pollo, the protagonist, is a sensitive youg man, who wanders around the town, much like a stray dog, and after making an agitated speech to an apathetic crowd eventually ends up in a mental hospital for a period. The mood of the novel has been compared to that of Camus's Stranger and Sartre's Nausea. Le Clézio's writing is simultaneously clear and intensive, impressionistic and controlled, nostalgic and contemporary. In an interview Le Clézio once said, that his favorite novelist are Stevenson and Joyce – noteworthy both exiled writers. Often his protagonists are loners, who try to find ways to cope with the modern life and technology, or come into conflict with urban surroundings. Le procès-verbal was soon translated into several
languages,
among others into Finnish. In spite of his international fame, Le
Clézio said in
an article in 1965: "Not yet sure if writing is a good way of
expression." In 1994 he was voted most popular living writer in France by the readers of the literary magazine Lire. Although Le Clézio's novels were received with great enthusiasm in France, he had no ambitions to join the literary elite of Paris, but adopted a nomadic lifestyle. He divided his time with his wife between France, the U.S. and Mauritius, which he dd not visit until 1981; he called the island his "little fatherland." Already before the publication of the 'Journal du Chercheur d'o´(1984-84, Diary of the Gold Prospector), which drew from the life of Le Clézio's paternal grandfather Léon, a Mauritian magistrate, Mauritians claimed the author as their own. Le Clézio also traveled in Nigeria and Japan and published translations of Mayan sacred texts. At the time of winning the Nobel Prize he lived in a mobile home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2007-2008 Le Clézio worked as a teacher in South Korea. When asked in 2006, where he wanted to be buried, Le Clézio said, "Sur une île" (On an island). Through Le Clézio's novels the sun and the sea, light and water, are recurrent images. From 1969 to 1973 Le Clézio lived among the Embera Indians in Panama. Haï (1971), written during this period, is a lyrical account of the author's experience which, as he has confessed, changed his whole life. On the whole, the natural environment, animate and inanimate, forms a kind of philosophical, unifying ground for Le Clézio's themes. A
sought after teacher of creative writing, Le Clézio taught in colleges
and universities around the world, including in 1966-67 at the Buddhist
University in Thailand, the University of Mexico, Mexico City, the
Boston University, the University
of Texas, Austin, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
"Literature is a complex, difficult path, but I hold it to be even more
vital today than in the time of Byron or Victor Hugo," Le Clézio argued
in his Nobel Prize lecture. His constant travels are reflected in the
settings of
his books. Through his own experience he has described the clash of
cultures, and the unequal side of globalization, the domination of
Western rationalism. In Désert (1980), which received the Grand
Prix Paul Morand, a young nomad woman, Lalla, from the Sahara becomes a
famous photo model, but she returns to Tangier to give birth to her
child. A parallel story tells of the crushing of the Tuaregs in the
beginning of the 20th century by the French colonizers. There is also
the story of a young boy, who travels across the Western Sahara in a
caravan. All of Le Clézio's characters have an unique relationship with
the barren and hot desert. For further reading: Conversations avec J.-M. G. Le Clézio by P. Lhoste (1971); 'Le Clézio, J(ean) M(arie) G(ustave),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); J.-M. G. Le Clézio by Jennifer Waelti-Walters (1977); Le Clézio ou la quête du désert by Simone Domange (1993); Le Clézio, la quête de l’accord originel by Nicolas Pien (2004); Le Clézio, "peintre de la vie moderne" by Marina Salles (2007); "Privileged Moments" in the Novels and Short Stories of J.M.G. Le Clézio: His Contemporary Development of a Traditional French Literary Device by Keith Moser (2008); Le Clézio’s Spiritual Quest by Thomas Trzyna (2012); The Fiction of J.M.G. Le Clézio: A Postcolonial Reading by Bronwen Martin (2012); J.M.G. Le Clézio: a Concerned Citizen of the Global Village by Keith Moser (2013); Narrating Expiation in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean Aquapelago: The Islanding of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio by Jacqueline Dutton, in Shima, Vol. 12 Issue 1 (2018); Le Clézio, l'homme du secret by Aliette Armel (2019) Selected works:
|
