French novelist Jean Marie Gustave le Clezio, whose long journeys from France to remote outposts of Africa and Latin America, yielded writing about exotic, endangered cultures, has won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Le Clezio, 68, is an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation,” the Swedish Academy said on its website. Born in Nice in 1940, Le Clezio is the first writer in French to win since novelist Claude Simon in 1985.
“I was not at all prepared — I was reading a book” when the Nobel committee called, Le Clezio told a Paris briefing today.
Le Clezio’s first novel, “Le Proces-verbal” (“The Interrogation”), was published when he was 23, and his early work in the 1960s and 1970s challenged conventional narrative with its experimentation. The books that followed described crises, such as “Fever” (1965) and “The Flood” (1966).
“As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality,” the Academy said.
Lost culture: His breakthrough came in 1980, when he was awarded a prize from the French Academy for “Desert”, which examines a lost culture in North Africa and becomes a treatment of European society from the perspective of African immigrants.
His parents had strong ties to the former French colony of Mauritius and Le Clezio moved to Nigeria at the age of eight, joining his father, who was stationed there as a doctor during World War II. A speaker of both French and English, the young author began writing at that early age.
Le Clezio has enriched his work by travelling widely in Europe, Africa and among Indian tribes in Mexico and Central America. He now divides his time between homes in Albuquerque in New Mexico; Mauritius, where he also has citizenship; and Nice.
“His style is simple, beautiful, limpid — you will never find complicated words or rhetoric formulas in his books,” Jerome Garcin, a friend of Le Clezio and a literary critic for French weekly ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’, said in an interview. “He is an atypical writer — he is French but does not belong to the French intellectual milieu. He inhabits his own universe.”
Le Clezio's literary influences hail from beyond France; in addition to Emile Zola and Comte de Lautreamont, he says he draws inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson and James Joyce.
Family history: The writer's more recent work has taken a more personal turn that examines his family’s history in France and Mauritius. The 2003 novel “Revolutions” deals with what the Academy called Le Clezio’s most important themes: “memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict”.
Le Clezio’s latest novel, “Ritournelle de la faim”, was introduced in bookstores on October 2, according to Editions Gallimard, his publisher. It focuses on the premiere of Ravel’s “Bolero” in Paris, an event Le Clezio's mother attended and described to him in his childhood.
“I am very proud,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an e-mailed statement today. “It's an honour for France, the French language, and the French-speaking world.”
US ‘ignorance’: The Academy's permanent secretary Horace Engdahl, who read out the statement today in Stockholm, stoked controversy in recent weeks by saying that American authors were impeded because the US was “too isolated” and weighed down by a restraining “ignorance”, the Associated Press reported on September 30. “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the US,” Engdahl told AP.
