Home > Ephemera > Le Clézio is 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner

Le Clézio is 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner

October 9, 2008 karlo mikhail Leave a comment Go to comments
French Author Jean Marie Le Clezio and Wife by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

"French Author Jean Marie Le Clezio and Wife" by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

It’s finally out. The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. I admit I haven’t come across Le Clézio before, thus I do not know anything much about him apart from the Swedish Academy’s words of praise: Le Clézio, the awarders said, is an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” I hope that with Le Clézio winning the prize, I’ll be able to find some of his books here in our island in time for Christmas. In any case, let’s all read his bio-bibliography in the Nobel Prize website. ■

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  1. boyband
    October 9, 2008 at 8:47 pm | #1
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    http://www.arelis.gr
    it contains the forbidden in greece erotonomicon and the poems new york olympia and exhibition of orthodromic retrospection

  2. karlo mikhail
    October 11, 2008 at 6:33 pm | #2
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    Maxim Jakubowski’s Guardian Books Blog entry gives us a few insights on this year’s Nobel Laureate. Apart from the fact that his books are awfully out of print in English, it seems that Le Clézio is referred to by the initials JMG Le Clézio in his books (like JG Ballard and VS Naipaul) rather than his full name as was done by the Nobel awarders and literary commentators these past two days.

  3. karlo mikhail
    October 12, 2008 at 11:12 am | #3
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    Check out past New York Times reviews of JMG Le Clézio’s books in PDF:

    Interrogation (1964)
    Fever (1966)
    The Flood (1967)
    Terra Amata (1969)
    War (1973)

  4. karlo mikhail
    October 12, 2008 at 11:15 am | #4
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    Clezi-who? The Literary Saloon on how most U.S. literary commentators response to JMG Le Clézio’s winning the Nobel confirms Engdahl’s point:

    Here’s a guy whose first novel was reviewed in Time, for god’s sake (even if he is now published in the US, if at all, by small and university presses, in limited print-runs — but at least the occasional work continues to appear in translation). For all of Kirsch’s support for Philip Roth as an international literary figure, Le Clézio may well be the closest thing to Roth the French have: as has been noted, he’s very popular in France, and while not part of the literary establishment is certainly a leading literary figure there. He’s also very internationally oriented — yet how much does he figure in the ‘big dialogue of literature’ in the US ? For twenty years now the few books that have been published in the US have rarely rated more than a Publishers Weekly mention, and hardly been reviewed elsewhere.

    Sorry, but the American reactions suggest that the American literary scene is almost entirely inward looking. If so many, especially those who are constantly discussing and dealing with literature (as, for example, so many literary webloggers are), are unfamiliar with an author of Le Clézio’s stature, what hope is there of any international dialogue ? We’re not talking about some obscure poet from some obscure nation, we’re talking about an author who has been publishing for over three decades (and began with a pretty big splash, i.e. was immediately noticed), has had a dozen books translated into English, and writes in the language from which the most fiction is translated into English, year in and year out. If an author like him turns out to be considered an unknown, what hope is there for the less prominent authors from less prominent cultures ?

  5. karlo mikhail
    October 14, 2008 at 8:23 am | #5
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    From Peter Strothard, the Times Literary Supplement editor:

    This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature loves America—the America before Columbus arrived most of all…

    Le Clézio—known to his admirers as JMG—is not a fully paid member of the Washington-hating Paris intelligentsia.

    He is a wanderer who spends time at his family home in Mauritius, in Nice, and in New Mexico.

    But his subjects are commonly the peoples erased by dominant cultures—in America, Africa and the Pacific…

    His first book, Le Proces Verbal (1963), is still his best known outside France. Its story of a lost boy in Nice, who grapples with both philosophy and a lost girl on a billiard table, has echoes of Albert Camus, an earlier French Nobel winner.

    The experimental text included crossed out words and newspaper cuttings of the hero’s admissions to psychiatric hospital. The Times Literary Supplement praised at the time the book’s “own form of lucid lyricism which suggests that he might one day produce something quite remarkable.”

    Le Clézio’s later works have focused on themes of oppression in more traditional forms than those at the beginning of his career. His best novel and the one that reveals his life and obsessions the most is Revolutions (2003)—a 550-page epic story that runs from Nice to London and Mexico to Mauritius. It shifts in time from the French revolutionary wars to the massacre of Mexican students in 1968. Its availability in English would be a major gain from today’s news…

    The Nobel secretary’s remarks last week about the unlikelihood of an American winner have caused much unfavorable comment in Britain. The politician and author, Denis MacShane, called the row: “the last curse of George W. Bush.”

    …

    But he is right about the insularity of America in publishing translations: “It would be wonderful if it were as easy to buy an English Le Clézio in New York as a French Philip Roth in Paris”

  6. boyττου
    October 14, 2008 at 6:58 pm | #6
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    he deserved it because he is a sensual poetic writer

    http://www.arelis.gr
    it contains erotonomicon that was forbidden in greece due to its critisism for the american and european imperialism of 2ost and 21 st century that socked the greek public opinion with its sexuality and the publishing houses with its literature innovations [including the poems new york olympia and
    exhibition of orthodromic retrospection]

  7. karlo mikhail
    November 6, 2008 at 10:55 pm | #7
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