Desert (Verba Mundi) [Hardcover]

J. M. G. Le Clezio (Author), C. Dickson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Verba Mundi | Publication Date: June 1, 2009

The Swedish Academy, in awarding J.M.G. Le Clezio the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, praised Desert as Le Clezio's definitive breakthrough as a novelist. Published in France in 1980, Desert received the Grand Prix Paul Morand from the Academie Francaise, was translated into twenty-three languages, and quickly proved to be a best-selling novel in many countries around the world.

Available for the first time in English translation, Desert is a novel composed of two alternating narratives, set in counterpoint. The first takes place in the desert between 1909 and 1912 and evokes the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men, notorious 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 relates the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. Though she is an orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, the blood of her proud, obstinate tribe runs in her veins. All too soon, Lalla must flee to escape a forced marriage with an older, wealthy man. She travels to France, undergoing many trials there, from working in a brothel to success as a highly paid fashion model, but she never betrays the blood of her ancestors.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the few works by 2008 Nobel laureate Le Clézio to be translated into English, this mythic novel tells two parallel stories of descendants of a holy man called Al Azraq. The novel begins with Nour, a Berber boy who bears witness to the failed rebellion led by Sheik Ma el Aïnine against the French in the years leading up to WWI. In the cadences of an incantation, Le Clézio renders the dire suffering of the displaced desert peoples who turn to Ma el Aïnine for guidance. The parallel story, set in the near-contemporary, portrays Lalla, a young woman who lives on the Moroccan coast and spends her days exploring the seashore and listening to the stories of her aunt and the fisherman Old Naman. After escaping an arranged marriage, Lalla lands in Marseille and finds not the gleaming white city of Naman's stories but a cruel place cut off from nature. Le Clézio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clezio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. --Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times (8/30/2009)

One of the few works by 2008 Nobel laureate Le Clezio to be translated into English, this mythic novel tells two parallel stories of descendants of a holy man called Al Azraq. The novel begins with Nour, a Berber boy who bears witness to the failed rebellion led by Sheik Ma el Ainine against the French in the years leading up to WWI. In the cadences of an incantation, Le Clezio renders the dire suffering of the displaced desert peoples who turn to Ma el Ainine for guidance. The parallel story, set in the near-contemporary, portrays Lalla, a young woman who lives on the Moroccan coast and spends her days exploring the seashore and listening to the stories of her aunt and the fisherman Old Naman. After escaping an arranged marriage, Lalla lands in Marseille and finds not the gleaming white city of Naman's stories but a cruel place cut off from nature. Le Clezio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing. --Publisher's 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 Algerian guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society. --from the Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy

When French writer Le Clezio 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 Clezio 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 Clezio 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 Clezio s incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant. --Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

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. --Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times (8/30/2009)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine; First U.S. Edition edition (June 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567923860
• ISBN-13: 978-1567923865
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel about the struggle for survival of a desert warrior culture, August 8, 2009

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desert (Verba Mundi) (Hardcover)

2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature J.M.G. Le Clezio presents Desert, a novel about the struggle for survival of a desert warrior culture, "the last free men". Consisting of two alternating viewpoints in contrast over the course of a century. Beginning in a North African desert in 1909 with the migratory journey of a young boy and his "blue men" desert warrior people, forced out of their land by French colonial soldiers, and interwoven with the story of an orphan girl in modern Marseille descended from the desert people, Desert is an enthralling and unforgettable read, flawlessly translated from the original French by C. Dickson. At once both a personal human story and a saga of the (often cruel) legacy of colonization, Desert is highly recommended particularly for public and college library collections.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mauritania, Morocco, and Marseille..., March 5, 2010

By 

John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Desert (Verba Mundi) (Hardcover)

...to be alliterative.

LeClézio won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2008, primarily for this work. In the making of such awards, like the premise that the Supreme Court makes its legal decisions based on the results of the last election, there are undoubtedly significant political considerations. LeClézio has written about "The European Dilemma," to play off a phrase originally formulated by his fellow European, Gunnar Myrdal, when he wrote "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy" in 1944. Each book, in quite different ways, examines the problems of a democratic society with a significant unassimilated minority, which has been brought, or induced to come, for the value of their "cheap labor." LeClézio's book concerns France, a country that is nominally Christian, but largely secular, far more so than the United States; 10-12% of France's population is Muslim, mainly from the Maghreb (Northwestern Africa.) The "assimilation," or lack of same, of the latest arrivals to France is the central theme.

LeClézio novel is presented as two alternating stories; the first is of the coming-of-age boy, Nour, and is set in 1909-10, when French forces are hunting down "rebel" leaders and their followers in Mauritania and southern Morocco. The second narrative is of Lalla, a coming-of-age girl who decides to flee her bleak life in a "bidonville" (a shanty town) and seek her "fortune" in Marseille. The author does not give an exact date for her story, but it must be in the late `70's. The author never directly addresses the "cause and effect" aspects of these stories; it is left to the reader.

"Desert" isn't an easy read, but then neither is Faulkner or Joyce. I felt the real strength of the novel is LeClézio's ability, as someone coming from an industrialized country, to depict accurately the pre-industrialized outlook. It is fully attuned to the natural world, where awareness of the phase of the moon is intrinsic; a life without watches; a life full of djinns and spirits. LeClézio's novel reminded me of the works of AbdulRahman Al Munif, particularly "Cities of Salt," in which he depicts the pre-industrialized outlook in Arabia as it collides with the foreign oil workers from Aramco. I also found Lalla's experiences in Marseille quite evocative. It is a city that I had disliked for a considerable period, but finally adjusted my outlook; instead of trying to see another Provencal village, I realized it was simply a "sunny New York."

However, I did have some problems with the novel. Sorry, I do have a watch, and a calendar, and Lalla's experiences over the nine months of her pregnancy were just too unrealistic. Among other matters, she became fluent in French in apparently four or five months. I also felt that various descriptions of the desert world were too expansive, and at times redundant. And geographically, the depiction of the location of the "bidonville" did not conform with the landscape of Northern Morocco. There could also have been tighter editing; for example, how many times was the reader told about the "bristling hair" on the dogs in Marsaille? And then there is a problem for mono-lingual readers. Books written in English sometimes have non-translated French or German, assuming the reader knows these languages, or inferring the meaning by context. LeClézio ups the language requirements by including non-translated Arabic, such as the words: "majnoon," and "ummi." Ok, so maybe we should be learning, and in these cases its "crazy," and "my mother."

Much credit should go to LeClézio for his depiction of one of Europe's central problems, not now, when there is so much focus on the so-called "clash of civilizations," but rather at its very inception, in the `60's and `70's. His novel will remain a seminal work as we seek solutions to the problem. Finally, it was heart-warming to note that Leclézio has chosen Albuquerque as his home, for six months of the year. No doubt the desert environment, similar to Mauritania, is a pull. Unfortunately he seems to be unrecognized in his adopted hometown, which may be the way he prefers it. Still, it is an honor, and he should be much more widely read.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, lyrical language, August 13, 2009

By 

LeeAnn Heringer (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Desert (Verba Mundi) (Hardcover)

This isn't a traditional novel, it certainly don't contain a strong plot where the interaction between characters drive it forward. She meets other characters, she moves through a landscape, but she doesn't understand them anymore than they understand her.

It's a beautiful poetical meditation about the inner-life of the people of the Maghreb. The main character that you spend the most time with is an uneducated orphan that creates explanations for what happens around her out of superstitions, stories told by the fire, and dreams. Seen through her eyes, there's a lot of magic and wonder in the desert. It's all about the images.