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56 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Novel on struggles and hopes of refugees, September 28, 2004
This review is from: Wandering Star (Lannan Translation Selection Series) (Paperback)
The "wandering stars" are two young girls, each trying to escape from an oppressive, threatening condition. Esther is a Jewish girl who escapes from Nazi-occupied Europe to Israel. Nejma lives in a Palestinian refugee camp. The two girls' lives are not intertwined physically, but rather spiritually in how they both deal with similar feelings of fear, helplessness, and desire for a better life. Le Clezio, a French author of 20 novels, goes beyond politics, cultural differences, and historical moments to cast light on the universal feelings in experiences of suffering and the struggles, desires, and dreams growing out of such experiences.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy It For Everyone You Know, December 29, 2008
This review is from: Wandering Star (Lannan Translation Selection Series) (Paperback)
Having read some of Le Clezio's earliest work ("The Giants", "War", "Book of Flights", all of which I have also commented upon on Amazon), this book seems like a bit of an anomaly- it is, unlike the aforementioned troika, a sustained narrative written in a limpid, sober, hauntingly spare style. That early triumvirate (now reissued by the good folks at Vintage) is intent on undoing the frayed fabric of fiction, interrogating the repressed political motivations/ramifications of literature as an institution. "Wandering Star", by contrast, is in most respects a rather orthodox novel, save for the somewhat inexplicable shifts between an impersonal, omniscient narrative voice and first-person diary accounts. All of this, I suppose, can be attributed to the decades that separate said works- one can, by comparison, think of the trajectory that Foucault's career would assume with age (from the irreverent stylistic gymnastics of "Order of Things" to the austere, worldly-wise calm of "Care Of The Self").
Such surprises aside, I can, without reservation, affirm that "Wandering Star" is a tremendous feat. While being extraordinarily readable (I would imagine that most readers would be able to finish the novel in two sittings, if not one), it is incredibly suggestive and deeply compassionate, without being maudlin or overwrought. Access to a box of tissues is advised while you read this novel- there are moments of tremendous beauty and sadness. Beyond this, the sheer sensuality of the prose is comparable to the very best of Whitman, early Rimbaud, Camus (the texture and ambience of Esther's sunbaked narrative reminds me very much of "The First Man", Nejma's harrowing half invokes memories of "The Plague"), Gide, Lawrence, Li Bai and Lucretius. I have always felt that Le Clezio is, above all else, a feral, visceral sort of writer- even his earliest works, for all their formal brilliance, structural invention and lexical pyrotechnics, are suffused with a deep, vitalistic affirmation of the sensual world. Le Clezio's sympathies are largely with the corporeal and the tactile, as opposed to the cerebral. This unflinching love of life has assumed various names throughout the history of Western letters- for Spinoza it was the "Conatus", for Blake, "energy", for Nietzsche, the "Will To Power", for Deleuze it was "desire", for Hamsun and Le Clezio it is "hunger", that indestructible, insatiable lust for life that cannot be repressed by any sort of tyranny. It is within the pages of "Wandering Star" that the living pulse beneath all of Le Clezio's novels throbs loudest.
Yet,there is something else that distinguishes "Wandering Star", and Le Clezio's work at large, from the morass of postmodernist muck. Le Clezio is insistent that literature is never an insular, private affair, a hermetic cabal restricted to a privileged few. Literature is always a collective enunciation, storytelling is communal: "That's why Sadi Abou Talib, the Baddawi, the man who would later become my husband and who did not know how to read or write, having learned that I'd been to school in al-Jazzar, asked me to describe everything that we endure in the Nour Chams Camp, so that the world would know, nd no-one would ever forget." (207)..."She sat down in the doorway to our shack, facing outward, not wearing a veil, because she wasn't telling the story just for me." (213)Le Clezio, like all great artists, is keenly aware of the power of fabulation and its centrality to human experience. It is through stories that we herald the dawn, that we proclaim the advent of hope.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exodus, December 29, 2008
This review is from: Wandering Star (Lannan Translation Selection Series) (Paperback)
May 1948. The State of Israel has just been proclaimed. Two columns of refugees pass one another on a mountain road outside Jerusalem. One is a group of European Jews, now in trucks, nearing the end of their journey to the Holy City. The other, on foot, is a long straggling line of displaced Palestinians starting their own journey to nowhere. Briefly, the columns halt. A seventeen-year-old girl climbs down from her truck and comes face to face with another girl her own age. Their eyes meet. The Palestinian girl writes her name in a notebook, Nejma, and hands it over for the other to do the same: Esther. The columns move off in opposite directions.
It is a powerful image. Had the book jacket not made clear that this was to be the story of two women, it would have come as a surprise. For the first 200 pages have their own shape: the story of Esther's childhood in the French Alpes Maritimes, her narrow escape from the encroaching Holocaust, and her clandestine postwar emigration to Israel. Now Le Clézio counterposes another story, one dominated by deprivation and horror instead of youth and light, though both centered around attractive and resilient young women. But anybody trying to predict the course of the book at this stage would still be wrong.
The only other book by the 2008 Nobel laureate that I have read, ONITSHA, despite its almost mythical African setting, shows similar qualities to this one: adolescent protagonists, life-altering journeys, the mystique of an absent father, the search for home -- and above all the interplay of contrasting narratives. WANDERING STAR is constantly shifting between genres. It opens in radiant simplicity, a tale of growing-up almost like a young adult novel, but it unfolds with curious repetitions, in whorls and petals, at times becoming more a dream than a story. As the Italians withdraw from that part of France and the Germans move in, we move to another familiar trope, that of the Holocaust novel; but again many of the usual expectations are denied, or postponed only to be fulfilled almost as footnotes many pages later.
Over all of this lies the Exodus story. Esther (then called Hélène) is brought up by non-religious parents. There is a striking scene when on a whim she visits the little village synagogue, and the sound of the prayers in a language she doesn't understand becomes for her an all-enveloping light. She gradually begins to experience her own Jewishness, and becomes possessed by the ideal of Eretz Israel and the city of light at its heart. Her journey there will not be easy, but eventually she arrives -- only to have that Exodus story contested by another exodus in the opposite direction.
How will the two narratives be resolved? Can they be resolved? The biblical Exodus led to forty years in the wilderness, forty years of further wandering. The action in WANDERING STAR extends for a similar period and moves to Jordan, Canada, back to France. Readers of ONITSHA will know Le Clézio's penchant for postludes; what he does here is more scattered, more true to life, and possibly more profound. Near the end, Esther revisits her old homes, looking for memories. The old Nazi headquarters has been turned into condos, the torrent that flowed down her village street has become a trickle, the mountain refuge where they once sheltered on their flight is booked up with tourists. But up there among the rocks and grasses she comes to a new realization: that our physical wanderings from place to place are nothing compared to the journeys we make in our minds.
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