Desert - by J M G Le Clézio (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A masterpiece from J. M. G. Le Clézio, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The parallel stories of a lost culture in the North African desert and their descendants, unwanted immigrants in Europe.

Desert is two stories. The first takes place between 1909 and 1912 and is about the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men. They are warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour's tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour's tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last.

The second narrative tells the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. An orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, Lalla must flee to France where even greater challenges await her.

This is world literature at its most powerful from a master storyteller.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Grand Prix Paul Morand from the Académie Française

"Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. There is an element of the missionary in Le Clézio, just as there is still something of the rebel in him, in search of the new novel, trying to break loose from the traditional bonds of fiction and language to mirror a wider world--as the Nobel citation described, to explore 'a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization'. Beneath his pantheism and ethnology, there is also a serious critic of contemporary Western civilization and its rationalism, pointing out the conflict between nature and cities, the disconnect between man and mythology."--Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times Book Review

"When French writer Le Clézio was presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, the response of many Americans was, Who? That's because so few of his stunning works have been translated into English, including this 1980 fever dream of a novel about earth and spirit, war and exile. In poetic language at once piercingly realistic and rhapsodically supernatural, Le Clézio tells the dramatic stories of two mystical, resilient children of the North African desert, members of a nomadic tribe of warriors. Nour endures a horrific forced march across the desert just prior to World War I, as French soldiers invade and a holy sheik struggles to keep the planet's last free people free. Decades later, Lalla, a shantytown seer channeling the hidden life force of the forbidding desert, is forced to flee Morocco for Marseilles, where she witnesses the misery of other despised immigrants. In scenes of shimmering intensity, Le Clézio contrasts nature's stark and majestic clarity, from scouring sand to the incinerating sun and the vast gleaming net of stars, with the chaos, toxicity, and injustice of human life. A long time coming for English-language readers, Le Clézio's incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant."--Booklist

"Le Clézio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing."--Publishers Weekly

"This work 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. The main character, the [Moroccan] guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society."--from the Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy