Ten days before the announcement of this year’s Nobel Literature laureate, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the award’s selection committee, gave an interview that set cisatlantic literary publications ablaze. In it, he said that American writers were “too isolated, too insular” to win the prize, that they “don’t translate enough and don’t participate in the big dialogue of literature,” nor “challenge Europe as the center of the literary world.” “That ignorance,” he continued, “is restraining.” Literary columnists took the cue, saving the rhetoric traditionally spent discussing the relative merits of Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, or Don DeLillo to lambaste Engdahl instead. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, told the AP, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.” The comments of The New Criterion’s editor, Roger Kimball, evinced the Americans’ growing disaffection with the Nobel; “It strikes me as a kind of publicity stunt for a prize that in recent years has demonstrated its fatuousness and political complexion with one political laureate after the next punctuated now and then by a V. S. Naipaul just to lend a patina of credibility,” he was quoted as saying to the AP. Meanwhile, the director of the National Book Foundation, Harold Augenbraum, offered to send Engdahl a reading list in a publicity stunt of his own.

The announcement of the decision on October 9 felt like yet another sally in the dispute. The winner, J. M. G. Le Clézio, is a French writer of Mauritian parents who has lived in Nigeria, England, and Mexico, and now divides his time between Mauritius, Nice, and New Mexico. “Frenchman, yes, but more so a traveler, a citizen of the world,” Engdahl said at the conference held to announce the winner; “his works have a cosmopolitan character” — ostensibly what American works lack. The press in North America (even in francophone Canada) responded in unison: “Le Clézi-who?” Le Clézio, who has published more than thirty books, has had fewer books translated into English than into German, Japanese, or Swedish, and even those few were hard finds before the announcement. That the U.S. should have done such a thorough job of ignoring a man who — already in 1994 — was voted by the literary review Lire “the greatest living French-language writer” surely counts as evidence of the country’s insularity. Indeed, even before reading his books, columnists found it difficult not to notice that Le Clézio had at least one credential; he substantiated Engdahl’s statements. That, as Peter Stothard of the Times Literary Supplement wrote, was “a pinch of salt in the American wound.” On the other hand, the accolade also gave American columnists a chance to substantiate their claim — that is, that the laureateship all too often passes right by the best writers to go to those who most convincingly embrace the right ideology (cf. Le Clézio’s Nobel speech: “literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas and images that remain foreign to the vast majority”). Curious myself, I too dipped into Le Clézio’s oeuvre.

The laureate’s career started with a bang. With his first book, Le Procès-Verbal, he snatched the Prix Renaudot in 1963 and enthralled France. The book, which sold some 100,000 copies in its first year, was soon translated into English as The Interrogation, and was reviewed even by Time, albeit not very favorably (“truly a tale of tedium,” the review concluded; meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement nailed it: “his lucid lyricism…suggests that he may one day produce something quite remarkable”). The Interrogation is, like the other books Le Clézio wrote till the mid-1970s, very experimental (drawing comparisons to Georges Perec as well as Camus and Sartre), with crossed-out words and newspaper clippings, and barely a trace of a plot (plots, it seems, are not something Le Clézio holds in very high esteem). Of this avant-garde period, however, Terra Amata, published four years later, is certainly one of the best.

Le Clézio once said in an interview that for him “there’s no need to envisage the course of a whole life, the whole doesn’t speak; what matters is detail, a second of a life, but a second so rich with past and future that it tells all one can know about a being.” Terra Amata is the story seconds tell; it is the story of Chancelade (“de la chance”), a rather unexceptional character with a penchant for unearthing the epiphanies latent in details, in the microscopic. Potato-bugs scuttling across the garden of his house occasion the sudden realization that Fate is of an order of magnitude so large that even our most vehement pleas for mercy will never be heard. A post-intercourse cigarette ends in material ecstasy: “no more anything anywhere. Just perfect and magnificent extension, empty extension, without a word, without a thought, without a gesture that might make it possible to measure, or understand, or even guess.”

These wide-ranging epiphanies are the entire substance of the book. They are the pivotal moments in the life of Chancelade, the shifts in direction; the infinitude of other moments, which the book leaves out, are merely a straight line between them, and can ostensibly be inferred from what we are provided with. But because of this want of context, it is sometimes difficult to know what to make of Chancelade’s sudden insights; what are we to think, for example, of the conclusion that “there are mirrors everywhere in the world,” the subject matter of some ten pages?

After a remarkably sensitive sketch of childhood, the book reaches its zenith in the middle chapters. Infatuated with Mina, Chancelade finds everything to be pregnant with meaning; everything shouts its rapturous assertion of life:

There was nothing mysterious about it, or even hidden. If only you wanted to be able to read, the message appeared in the street, over the sky, or on the grassy earth. All the millions of different messages that all meant the same thing…
The world is spread out all around, perfectly comprehensible.

Inebriated by his nascent sense of overarching understanding, he sends Mina a long message in Morse code. “YOU’RE AS BEAUTIFUL AS THE SEA INVISIBLE IN THE DARK,” the message reads. “I WANT TO BE WITH YOU TILL I DIE. IF YOU UNDERSTOOD SWICH [sic] YOUR LIGHT ON AND OFF.” But alas, the light on the other side of town burns on.

In the following chapter, Chancelade and Mina sit in a café and communicate only in sign language, and the next is completely written in gobbledygook. These three chapters sit in the middle of the book like a Mona Lisa — a magnificent if mysterious front that belies an uncanny shift in the perspective of the background. Before them, Le Clézio is in his element — childhood; after them, there is only a hubristic attempt by the then 27-year-old to depict an aging man obsessed with death.

The second half of the novel grows as feeble as its protagonist. For support, it leans heavily on the crutch of philosophy, on the ideas Le Clézio had expounded a couple of years earlier in the non-fictional L’extase matérielle. Every subsequent chapter of Terra Amata testifies to Le Clézio’s own unfamiliarity with old age. A few passages, however, still elicit the paroxysms of emotion that before followed each other in such quick succession. A sublime realization takes place when Chancelade lies on the roof of a high-rise, between the tiny pedestrians below and the immense sky above (L’extase: “between the infinitely huge and the infinitely tiny there is the infinitely average”), looking up:

This flat hollow, this infinity suddenly drawn back, this shop-window out of all possible reach … The sky thirsted for life and light. It sucked up relentlessly the savours of the earth, menacing, weakening it with all its strength.

But Chancelade’s exquisite musings soon devolve into a tedious catalog of existentialist platitudes (“There’s nothing, you’re alone, there never has been anything and there never will be!”). After that, old Chancelade is sadly as much a burden to the readers as he is to his son.

Onitsha proffers an altogether different Le Clézio. In 1980, with the publication of Désert (of which a translation can be expected next year), the laureate’s writing took a turn toward more traditional style and storylines. Onitsha, published twelve years later, is a semiautobiographical account of a boy’s journey with his mother to Nigeria, where the boy’s estranged father is stationed. A magnificently evocative passage presages the Africa Fintan and his mother will find:

The men lifted their hammers one after the other and brought them down: without a cry, without a song, and other blows replied from the other end of the ship, and still others, and soon the entire hull vibrated, pulsated like a living animal.

The Africans removing rust from the ship’s hull do and undo the work of Europe; they give cold machine life, and live machine death. The recurring word “other” will eventually underpin the entire narrative.

Once in the town of Onitsha, the day-to-day friction between foreigners and natives wears away compassion, and colonizers either grow wholly indifferent to the cruelty intrinsic to their situation, or seek refuge in aloofness. Young Fintan, spurned by Africans, spurning Europeans, finds himself utterly alone. Whereas in Le Clézio’s more avant-garde works style was too often at odds with content, here his unassumingly pellucid prose perfectly corresponds with the sentiment that engenders it. Take, for example, a stunningly atmospheric morsel from early on in Onitsha:

All day long the islands lay there, to port, like a pod of petrified whales. Birds had even appeared at the stern, squawking seagulls circling above the deck to eye the people below, who watched in turn as they tossed bread for the gulls to catch; then they flew off again, and the islands were nothing more than faint dots, barely visible.

Space and time are confused, interchangeable, but there’s no sleight of hand, no trick adroitly performed under the trapdoor of the text. Rather, it is the character of journeys — of interweaving time and space — that is allowed to transpire through the prose. Indeed, Le Clézio’s skill lies precisely in weaving the veil of language so thin that we see his world beyond it in clear relief.

The obverse of this fact is that when impetus fails, no style or art remains to hold the narrative together. Onitsha is a much more sustained effort than Terra Amata, but it drags on at times. The last section in particular, a brief account of Fintan’s life after his return to Europe, is a woeful epilogue that gives the book an unfortunately bitter aftertaste.

Even Homer nods, but Le Clézio too often takes, and doles out, veritable naps. His introduction to American readers is certainly a happy occurrence, but not a blessing so great as to quell the disgruntlement felt at the Nobel Prize committee’s continuing disregard for American writers. And Le Clézio’s writing may receive particularly harsh scrutiny on account of the circumstances in which he has been introduced to the American public. John Updike, whose name always comes up in the pre-announcement hubbub, got it right when he pointed out the downside of the prize: “Some Greek leader was once asked why there was no statue to him in the town square. He replied that he would rather people ask why there isn’t one than why there is one.”

Julian K. Arni ’11 will make you believe and tremble by dint of pandiculation.