Customer Reviews

The Prospector

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Prospector has in essence only two fully developed characters, the prospector himself and the Mascarene Islands. The author, who obviously loves the place, treats the islands off the African coast in the Indian Ocean as a beloved character describing in delicious detail the ocean, mountains, wildlife and plants. I usually tire easily of too much detail; however, it never seemed to be too much. The image of the angry birds coming to challenge the visitors and then coming to accept them is haunting. The vivid images of English Cove, that seems to be a creation of the author, made me feel like I was there.

The translation is superb, comparable to effort in Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda, leading one to forget that it is, in fact, a translation. I wonder if we give enough credit to these talented men and women who make the Nobel laureates and others accessible to a wide audience.

Concerning the second character, I had the feeling that Le Clézio was trying to create the purest character imaginable in Alexis similar to Doestoevky's effort in The Idiot. His devotion to his sister and mother, unsullied by the usual drives to the opposite sex, was trumped only by his obsession with the Corsair and finding the hidden treasure. His purity blends with that of another pure figure, a young woman who saves his life and goes on to teach him to forget about the treasure.

Read it; you'll like it.

The title of this mesmerizing novel is misleading. The original French, LE CHERCHEUR D'OR, means literally "the seeker for gold." THE PROSPECTOR is an over-literal translation for such a poetic book, quite without metaphorical resonance. More important, it is a forward-looking word, whereas Le Clézio's protagonist is entirely concerned with looking BACK, trying to regain entry to an Eden from which he was expelled as a child. Fortunately the Gauguin pictures reproduced on both the paperback and hard-bound editions are perfect in their evocation of an almost unreal tropical paradise; if you respond to them, you are likely also to be drawn into the spell of this book.

The action, such as it is, is simply told. When the novel opens in 1892, Alexis L'Etang is a boy of 7, living on the coast of Mauritius, roaming the island with a native friend or sharing dreams with his beloved elder sister Laure. It is an idyllic life for a child, but it comes to an end when his father, a man of greater vision than business sense, is ruined by a devastating hurricane. After years of living in poverty, Alexis journeys by sailing ship to the distant island of Rodrigues, to pursue his father's tales of treasure concealed there by the Unknown Corsair. On the sea, and later living in a remote part of the island, he makes different discoveries from those he had expected. He also falls in love with a native girl, Ouma, who like him has turned back to nature after a convent education. World War I intervenes, and Alexis goes off to Ypres and the Somme, but returns to the islands to discover the true meaning of his quest.

Le Clézio does not so much describe things as evoke them by incantation. In reviewing ONITSHA, his masterpiece, I thought that his fondness for the heroic roll-call came from Homer, but the first influences on the young Alexis are less elevated: the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, the author of SHE:

--- Zweeke the sorcerer said, "You ask me, my father, to tell you of the youth of Umslopogaas, who was named Bulalio the Slaughterer, and of his love for Nada, the most beautiful of Zulu women." Each one of those names was buried deep in me, like the names of living people.

Throughout the book, Alexis conjures with the sheer sound of naming things: islands, mountains, rivers, trees, plants, birds. The book is written entirely in the first person, with very little dialogue, giving the rhapsodic effect of a waking dream, even amid the horrors of the Western Front:

--- What do these rivers we are always talking about look like... the Yser, the Marne, the Meuse, the Aisne, the Ailette, the Scarpe? They are rivers of blood flowing under low skies, thick, heavy water carrying debris from the woods, burned beams, and dead horses.

Or here, near the end, when the author merges past and present in timeless simplicity:

--- Our life on Mananava, far from other people, is like an exquisite dream. [...] At dawn we glide into the forest, which is heavy with dew, to pick red guavas, wild cherries, and cabbages, Madagascan plums, bullock's hearts, and bredes-songe and margosa leaves. We live in the same place as the maroons in Senghor and Sacalavou's time. Look there! Those were their fields. They kept their pigs, goats, and fowl there. And over there they grew beans, lentils, yams, and corn.

I have now read four Le Clézio books and some stories. All seem to be to some extent autobiographical, written out of a double loss -- his family removed from their home in Mauritius, and the author not seeing his father for the whole of his early childhood. The books feature travel and hardship, young protagonists in pursuit of some quest. They are filled with an aching nostalgia for a lost past, and with awe of the wild and ancient places of the earth and the secrets they may hold. In some ways, Le Clézio is a century behind his time; besides Rider Haggard, you can see the influence of Kipling and especially of Conrad. But his currency is modern; he deals in dreams. Let him once work his magic, then see if you can cast off his spell.

This "novel" is essentially one terrible and beautiful love letter to the sea. It is, au fond, more of a poem than a plot-driven narrative. I have no compunction at all in asseverating that the reader who does not feel or appreciate the power of the poetic will find nothing in this book to interest her/him. For me, the book was puissant and beautiful beyond all tears. Allow me to save the prospective reader some time by quoting the opening lines:

"As far back as I can remember I have listened to the sea; to the sound of it mingling with the wind in the filao needles, the wind that never stopped blowing....It is the sound that cradled my childhood. I can hear it now, deep inside me; it will come with me wherever I go....Not a day went by when I didn't go to the sea; not a night when I didn't wake up with my back sweaty and damp, sitting up in my cot, parting the mosquito net and trying to see the tide, anxious and full of desire I didn't understand.

I thought of the sea as human, and in the dark all senses were alert, the better to hear her arrival, the better to receive her. The giant waves leapt over the reefs and then tumbled into the lagoon; the noise made the air and earth vibrate like a boiler. I heard her, she moved, she breathed."

You may stop there. If you aren't enchanted already, the book is not for you. Search for something more prosaic and pedestrian - plenty of that sort of thing about. The only novel which this one resembles - and it is a VERY strong resemblance - is W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions (which I urgently press on all lovers of this book) with Alexis' Ouma taking the place of Rima, whose statue you can see in Hyde Park in honour of Hudson, if ever your travels should take you to London.

I don't know that there's much more I can add in laud of this beautiful and bittersweet novel in which waves of enchantment and disenchantment purl over the reader like strong tides over a bewitching, limitless seascape. I shall leave the final words to Alexis:

"Who can know their fate? It is written here, the secret that awaits me and that no one but I can unearth. It is written in the sea, on the spray of the waves, on the sky that covers us during the day, and in the unchanging constellations. How am I to understand what it says?"

This book will not help you to read what is written in water. But it will let you know that the writing is there for you.

(4.5 stars) Creating an adventure story which is also a coming-of-age story and an exploration of culture, Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clezio sets this novel in Mauritius, where his French family has deep roots and where he now has a home. The novel is unique--filled with lush descriptions and vibrant characters who appeal to the romantic in all of us while simultaneously evoking the violence and horror which mar their lives and make a mockery of "civilization." The novel's exotic setting inspires dreams of lost worlds, mysteries, and lives tied to nature and its beauties. At the same time, however, the author is exploring the damage wrought by plantation owners who have created and cruelly oversee the sugarcane fields worked by underpaid local help.

Alexis L'Etang, a child when the book opens in 1892, lives in Boucan, an area of Mauritius so remote that he and his sister Laure must be taught by their mother, as there is no nearby school. Theirs is a richly imaginative world, filled with stories which make their world less solitary. Their father, a dreamer, wants to build a generator to provide power for their part of the island, but he has over-mortgaged his house and land to his brother, a plantation owner. He keeps himself and Alexis inspired by maps and sketches he has acquired which show where the "Unknown Corsair" has buried his treasure on a nearby island.

As the author traces Ali's life over the ensuing thirty years, the reader observes him as a poor college student, an office worker, and eventually, in 1910, as a sailor on his way to nearby Roderigues, where he plans to search for the Unknown Corsair's treasure. Aided by Ouma, a young native woman, he spends almost two years identifying locations on his treasure map, before reality and World War I intrude.

Le Clezio is very straightforward, not subtle, here, creating over-the-top characters who face traumatic events while living under extreme pressures, characters who are not "ordinary" and who do not lead "ordinary" lives but who nevertheless captivate the reader and keep his/her attention. The novel often resembles an allegory in that every phase of the action over thirty years teaches a moral lesson or emphasizes a theme, to which the author deliberately calls attention. At various times his characters remind us that "Gold is worthless. You must not be scared of it," "[Death] is deceitful and insidious, keeping its whereabouts secret until it wants to pounce," "In the end it's the lice who win wars." The lush descriptions, the often idyllic setting, and the sensual romantic scenes counterbalance the moralizing, however, while the constant intrusion of harsh realities keeps the novel from becoming sentimental or predictable. Readers interested in becoming acquainted with Le Clezio's writing may find this straightforward novel an ideal starting place. Mary Whipple

"Haunting and lyrical," read the opening words of the Library Journal review at the top of this page. Well, yes, I guess that's true, but I'd also add "and tedious and cliched."

I've read the other, rhapsodic reviews here, so I guess it must be me. I like much of French art, I like contemporary literature, and I dutifully slogged through this book -- but I didn't like it. I'll give LeClezio points for conveying a sure sense of islands of the Indian Ocean, and sailing on said ocean, and prospecting like a ninny for a legendary treasure.

But there is much in this book that feels endlessendlessendless, like the narrator's blissed-out reflections as he pokes from rock to rock, or island to island. Like the descriptions of the narrator's anime-like island squeeze (think Dorothy Lamour in a sarong crossed with Emmanuelle Beart -- hey, Hope and Bing would've made a great Road movie out of this! "We're on the road to Mauritius..."). Like the curiously two-dimensional figures of the narrator's mother and sister, who wait offstage while he, um, keeps on prospecting. And sailing. And thinking. And --

-- really, if you need a fix of French exoticism, watch "Wages of Fear." If you need a fix of fruitless prospecting, watch "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." But I think this book is a dud.

Even in translation this novel by Nobel Prize winner, Le Clezio, paints exquisite pictures of the fauna, flora and peoples of the land and sea somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The story is a metaphor. It describes many aspects of the human condition, lives of plenty, of poverty, of servitude and near slavery- the human condition. It describes the trials of growing up, an overlong growing up and finally finding some resolution as adulthood descends. Along the way are views of Africa, the interaction of the whites and blacks. And then there is a very powerful description of soldiers in the first world war. A must read.

An interesting book with great use of language. The plot is not riveting, but interesting in that it took me to a time and place I never imagined before.

I read three of the nobel prize winner's novels: The Prospector as well as Wandering Star and one other. I thought Wandering Star was the best but The Prospector was excellent.

Le Clezio might have won a Nobel, but I thought this book was much ado about very little. He could describe settings with beautiful adjectives. Once a setting was described, Le Clezio described it again. And again, again, and again. He must have told us 15 times that the main character ignored death in the trenches of WW I. How insightful! The Prospector had little to say about life, about civilization, about anything (except pirate treasurer).