Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Grad School Lit Crit anyone?, March 8, 2010
*****I've read the book and contend it has nothing to do with the following:
moribundity Nietzsche and Heidegger signs, marks and traces signifier deconstructed textuality a congealed encrustation anthropomorphic metaphors radical semiotics Plato's Republic
verisimilitude the hobby horse of "S/Z" Roland Barthes writ large Derridean erasure an antediluvian age Fredric Jameson said, "Postmodernity is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Baudelaire Huysmans Wilde prisonhouse of artifice il n'y a pas de hors texte.
valorization of Gilles Deleuze Rabelais and Villon through to de Nerval, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Jarry, Celine, Eluard, Artaud, Bataille, Michaux the maudlin Verlaine Camus-esque hymns
*****and only slightly more to do with the following (minus the flowering allegations at the end):
It is this vision of infinity that serves as the central axis of the entire book. In revealing the infinitude that lies at the core of Indian life (and, by implication, *ourselves*), Le Clezio unearths a very different image of the Amerindians than what is traditionally conceived. Yes, the Indians were belligerent and bloodthirsty. Indeed, they could be despotic and cruel, though it is important to note that we are framing all of this in the timorous moral categories of the West. Yet, perhaps they gave us a glimpse of a democracy more radical than we had ever imagined, a Holderlinian utopia where God infuses every atom, every millisecond, every corpuscule. A world where desire is no longer a dirty secret, where dreams are no longer sublimated wish fulfilments, but passageways into eternity. In excavating the collective dreams of a devastated race, Le Clezio implores us to believe in our own, in a love that will overflow the dams that authority has erected and saturate the social body. You can call Le Clezio what you will, but it is certain that he is not a cynic. If that makes him a retrograde romantic, then so be it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Untold Story, August 4, 2009
This review is from: The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations (Hardcover)
This book really gets to the bottom of the conquering of the Amerindian civilizations. Le Clezio exposes the conquering for what it was, without pointing fingers or trying to push a thesis. Le Clezio gives the facts and lets the reader decide what they think of the occurence. It is hard to read this book and not feel sympathetic to the Amerindians in their situation. Wonderful, wonderful history read.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The interrupted thought of Amerindian civilizations, October 11, 2010
My wife recommended this book to me earlier this year, so I bought it, read it, and put it aside. For some reason, it just wasn't quite what I expected. I even regretted having bought it. Then, just two days ago, I picked it up again and re-read it, and discovered what I had missed. Right there in the subtitle "the interrupted thoughts of Amerindian civilizations, was the whole point of Le Clézio's book. What if the Amerindian civilizations had not been destroyed? "The conception of cyclical time, the idea of a creation based upon [chaos] might have been the points of departure for a new scientific and humanist way of thinking. [T]he respect for natural forces, the search for an equilibrium between man and the world might have been the necessary braking of technological progress in the Western world. Only today we are measuring what that equilibrium might have brought to medicine and psychology" (page 208). What if ... the possibilities are almost endless.
But this was not to be so. The Amerindians of Mexico and the Yucatan, whose cities were so beautiful that they were awe-inspiring, were far ahead of Europe's greatest cities in terms of cleanliness, waste removal and clean water, and whose music, visual and poetic arts astounded the invading Europeans was "in the span of one generation ... reduced to dust, to ashes." How could this possibly happen? "The Conquest was not just a handful of men taking over ... seizing the lands, the food reserves, the roads, the political organizations, the work force of the men and the genetic reserve of the women. It was the implementation of a project, conceived at the very beginning of the Renaissance, which aimed to dominate the entire world. Nothing that reflected the past and the glory of he indigenous nations was to survive: the religion, legends, customs, familial or tribal organizations, the arts, the language, and even the history - all was to disappear in order to leave room for the new mold Europe planned to impose upon them" (page 176). "All means, especially violence, were used to carry out the program of the destruction of the indigenous societies: these means formed the set of rules which were to govern the American colonies until Independence" (page 177).
The bulk of Le Clézio's wonderful book is an exploration of the rich cultural heritage of these people as it was preserved by Mendieta, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Fernando de Alva Ixtilxóchitl, and those Amerindian sources, such as the Mayan Popol Vuh that were not destroyed.
Some books just never let loose of my mind and imagination, and this is one of them. The author, J. M. G. Le Clézio, born in Nice, France in 1940, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
