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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
C'est très beau.
Ce livre me fut recommandé par ma cousine, qui m'avait prévenu que potentiellement sa poésie ne me porterait pas ; il est vrai que j'ai longtemps hésité à me former un avis pendant la lecture, car au début il m'a fallu du temps pour me mettre en résonnance avec cette écriture que je découvre.
La ligne de Lalla m'a beaucoup touché. J. M. G. Le Clézio traite ses personnages avec beaucoup de douceur, une tendresse qui fait du bien à lire. Peu à peu je suis entrée dans les images qu'il fait naître, j'ai apprivoisé ce monde qui devenait de plus en plus vif dans ma tête. Je suis content d'avoir pris le temps de rencontrer cet auteur et de ne pas avoir abandonné après les premières pages où j'étais encore trop fermé à l'imaginaire subtil qui était en train de se construire.
Ce livre me fut recommandé par ma cousine, qui m'avait prévenu que potentiellement sa poésie ne me porterait pas ; il est vrai que j'ai longtemps hésité à me former un avis pendant la lecture, car au début il m'a fallu du temps pour me mettre en résonnance avec cette écriture que je découvre.
La ligne de Lalla m'a beaucoup touché. J. M. G. Le Clézio traite ses personnages avec beaucoup de douceur, une tendresse qui fait du bien à lire. Peu à peu je suis entrée dans les images qu'il fait naître, j'ai apprivoisé ce monde qui devenait de plus en plus vif dans ma tête. Je suis content d'avoir pris le temps de rencontrer cet auteur et de ne pas avoir abandonné après les premières pages où j'étais encore trop fermé à l'imaginaire subtil qui était en train de se construire.
The parallel stories in this book were incredible, overall a fascinating read (although quite complex in French)
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Was supposed to finish for an essay for class but I didn't and wrote the essay anyways.
I came into this book with no historical background of the French colonial efforts in Northern Africa of the early 19th century. I had no idea until after I finished that many of the characters were real people: The great Sheik Ma al-Ainine, water of the eyes, who led the resistance; Colonel Mangin, a French colonialist and specialist in massacre; General Moinier and his siege of Morocco. I had only heard the names of great cities such as Marrakech, Tiznit, and Smara - I knew not where they were located nor their significance. I learned all this information through the perspective of Nour, a boy from the desert swept up in the great Sheik's religious resistance. But Desert's historical significance is not my greatest takeaway from the novel. J. M. G. Le Clezio is an avoided behemoth, a poet in every sense of the word. Never have I been so hypnotized by the written word, never have I been so drawn into the world of such a difficult read. Much of this is owed to the duality of the narrative. Lalla, a descendant of Nour, escapes a tarpaper shantytown in Morocco only to find the slums of Marseille in the 1970s to be a similar wade through penury. There is no fleeing from colonialism, it is our world and our world is it.
I will think about this novel for the rest of my life, and if not, shoot me dead, for I have lost something great.
I will think about this novel for the rest of my life, and if not, shoot me dead, for I have lost something great.
Some have maintained that the desert itself is the true protagonist of Desert. Abetted by Le Clézio’s evocative language, it certainly pervades the story of Nour: a historical narrative of the flight of the blue men (Tuaregs) from the colonizing French forces in 1910-12, yet it seems less prominent in that of Lalla although she is a child of the desert. Through her mother she is a descendant of those blue men and is even haunted by one, the man she calls El Ser. At the start of her story she lives with her aunt in a shanty town by the Atlantic Ocean probably in Morocco or the disputed Western Sahara. After the death of one of her few friends, the old fisherman, Naman, she flees with the shepherd Hartani to avoid marriage with an older man. It is not very clear how, but she ends up living in exile in Marseille, where her aunt has also arrived. Initially working cleaning rooms of other immigrants and associating with gypsies, she is noticed by a photographer who turns her into a top model. But this does not seem to alter her basic nature and she finally returns to Africa to have the child she conceived with Hartani.
The time line of Lalla’s story after she flees with Hartani strains credibility as a multitude of experiences are ostensibly taking place within the nine months between the conception and birth of her baby. It seems as if Le Clézio had too much that he wanted to convey in that short timeframe: continuing emphasis on Lalla’s artlessness and lack of interest in the rewards of the material world, the miserable situation of immigrants, the underlife of the gypsies, and the arbitrariness of the world of fashion. But time is rather a fluid concept in this novel where the hectic pace of life in the city is contrasted with the dunes of the desert where little changes. If one takes Lalla’s timeline with a pinch of salt and just concentrates on the events, the anti-materialist message and critique of ‘civilized society’ is heightened by the juxtaposition of Marseille with the close communities of those fleeing the colonizers. The desert is never far away. When Lalla goes to the store with the gypsy Radicz to blow her earnings:
it seems as if the electric light has brought the colour of the desert sun back to life, as if she had stepped directly from the path out on the plateau of stones into the Prisunic store.
Maybe everything really has disappeared and the big store is standing alone in the midst of the boundless desert, just like a fortress of stone and mud. Yet it is the entire city that is surrounded by the sand, held tightly in its grips, and you can hear the superstructures of the concrete buildings snapping while cracks run up the walls and the plate glass mirrors of skyscrapers fall to the ground.
This rather ominous note is aggravated by the vivid description of Radicz’s last moments, his petty theft and flight from the police ending in a horrendous death crushed by a bus that is witnessed by Lalla. Perhaps it is this which finally motivates her to depart and find her way back to the shanty town she left and then on to the familiar dunes where she has her baby just like her mother gave birth to her.
The time line of Lalla’s story after she flees with Hartani strains credibility as a multitude of experiences are ostensibly taking place within the nine months between the conception and birth of her baby. It seems as if Le Clézio had too much that he wanted to convey in that short timeframe: continuing emphasis on Lalla’s artlessness and lack of interest in the rewards of the material world, the miserable situation of immigrants, the underlife of the gypsies, and the arbitrariness of the world of fashion. But time is rather a fluid concept in this novel where the hectic pace of life in the city is contrasted with the dunes of the desert where little changes. If one takes Lalla’s timeline with a pinch of salt and just concentrates on the events, the anti-materialist message and critique of ‘civilized society’ is heightened by the juxtaposition of Marseille with the close communities of those fleeing the colonizers. The desert is never far away. When Lalla goes to the store with the gypsy Radicz to blow her earnings:
it seems as if the electric light has brought the colour of the desert sun back to life, as if she had stepped directly from the path out on the plateau of stones into the Prisunic store.
Maybe everything really has disappeared and the big store is standing alone in the midst of the boundless desert, just like a fortress of stone and mud. Yet it is the entire city that is surrounded by the sand, held tightly in its grips, and you can hear the superstructures of the concrete buildings snapping while cracks run up the walls and the plate glass mirrors of skyscrapers fall to the ground.
This rather ominous note is aggravated by the vivid description of Radicz’s last moments, his petty theft and flight from the police ending in a horrendous death crushed by a bus that is witnessed by Lalla. Perhaps it is this which finally motivates her to depart and find her way back to the shanty town she left and then on to the familiar dunes where she has her baby just like her mother gave birth to her.
A desert, a word that resembles an almost infinite expanse. A barren sea of dunes. At least for those who have never felt calmness it gives as the warm wind caresses their faces while sitting on top of a dune, and sand seeps through their fingers. Or until they see at the edge of the light, where the night begins, dancing sand wraiths carried by the wind. JMG Le Clézio saw all this and much more. His desert is not just a place devoid of life. He finds life where others do not see it, as well as death because there is no life without death or death without life.
The desert he paints with words is a way of life, it is a freedom, but also a prison because the desert is not always made up of hills of sand and oases scattered between them. Sometimes the desert is a city with its narrow streets winding through poor neighborhoods, which numerous people call home. Where the cry of a baby coughing and blunt sounds of husbands’ fists hitting wife’s body echoes through the night.
Following two narratives, several decades apart, Le Clézio tells his magical 1,001-night story like Scheherazade, not to prolong his own life but to spread the message of hope and perseverance of the human spirit in overcoming everything thrown before it.
The shorter narrative, the one that opens and ends the novel masterfully, begins a few years before World War I and is the story of the Blue Men, who came from the desert and went back into it as if from a dream. Nour, a boy of fourteen, is a member of one of the Berber tribes fleeing a French army made of Senegalese and Sudanese troops. Caravan travel through the desert leaving behind a trail of the dead; survivors, hungry and thirsty, exhausted, they move north in search of freedom from colonizers and their servants.
Lalla's story, the one that makes up most of the novel, takes place decades later. Probably in the 1970s as Le Clézio doesn't specify it anywhere. Lalla lives in slums on the edge of an unnamed town, where the desert ends and the ocean begins. She can't read or write, she doesn't have parents, but she has freedom. Hers is the desert and sky above it, the waves of oceans that crash on the coast, the light of the sun, and the winds that carry happiness and misfortune.
She has an aunt, an old fisherman called Naman who tells her stories about the cities of the world, and Hartani, a mute shepherd who talks without words and understands nature, who is an orphan like her, which is the thing that binds them together. Lalla is a descendant of the Blue Men and like them does not want to be restrained, so as soon as her aunt decides to marry her to a rich older man to save her from the slums, Lalla flees to the desert with Hartani, and then on, to the Marseilles, a city that Naman told her about.
The greatest strength of Le Clézio's "Desert" lies in his language and style, the words with which he paints the surroundings, making it seem as we are watching one of those independent art films with wide shots of nature and zooms on the face of the actors and their eyes from which we read their feelings that he presents to us with a beautiful passage after passage. His symbolism, themes, and decision to masterfully intertwine two narratives, from one where a character flees from the French who want to drive his people from their country to another in which a character flees to the French, just like other nations that have suffered the same fate, tells of his genius. Almost entirely avoiding dialogue, Le Clézio conveys the atmosphere of the desert, contemplating nature, faith, and the human spirit.
People who want the plot will hardly be satisfied with "Desert" because there is hardly any plot here, but for those who want to read slowly, enjoying every sentence and passage that makes us think about ourselves and our relation to life, those who want to get lost in the smells and sounds of a slum on the Atlantic coast or the alleys of Marseilles, "Desert" is an ideal novel.
The desert he paints with words is a way of life, it is a freedom, but also a prison because the desert is not always made up of hills of sand and oases scattered between them. Sometimes the desert is a city with its narrow streets winding through poor neighborhoods, which numerous people call home. Where the cry of a baby coughing and blunt sounds of husbands’ fists hitting wife’s body echoes through the night.
Following two narratives, several decades apart, Le Clézio tells his magical 1,001-night story like Scheherazade, not to prolong his own life but to spread the message of hope and perseverance of the human spirit in overcoming everything thrown before it.
The shorter narrative, the one that opens and ends the novel masterfully, begins a few years before World War I and is the story of the Blue Men, who came from the desert and went back into it as if from a dream. Nour, a boy of fourteen, is a member of one of the Berber tribes fleeing a French army made of Senegalese and Sudanese troops. Caravan travel through the desert leaving behind a trail of the dead; survivors, hungry and thirsty, exhausted, they move north in search of freedom from colonizers and their servants.
Lalla's story, the one that makes up most of the novel, takes place decades later. Probably in the 1970s as Le Clézio doesn't specify it anywhere. Lalla lives in slums on the edge of an unnamed town, where the desert ends and the ocean begins. She can't read or write, she doesn't have parents, but she has freedom. Hers is the desert and sky above it, the waves of oceans that crash on the coast, the light of the sun, and the winds that carry happiness and misfortune.
She has an aunt, an old fisherman called Naman who tells her stories about the cities of the world, and Hartani, a mute shepherd who talks without words and understands nature, who is an orphan like her, which is the thing that binds them together. Lalla is a descendant of the Blue Men and like them does not want to be restrained, so as soon as her aunt decides to marry her to a rich older man to save her from the slums, Lalla flees to the desert with Hartani, and then on, to the Marseilles, a city that Naman told her about.
The greatest strength of Le Clézio's "Desert" lies in his language and style, the words with which he paints the surroundings, making it seem as we are watching one of those independent art films with wide shots of nature and zooms on the face of the actors and their eyes from which we read their feelings that he presents to us with a beautiful passage after passage. His symbolism, themes, and decision to masterfully intertwine two narratives, from one where a character flees from the French who want to drive his people from their country to another in which a character flees to the French, just like other nations that have suffered the same fate, tells of his genius. Almost entirely avoiding dialogue, Le Clézio conveys the atmosphere of the desert, contemplating nature, faith, and the human spirit.
People who want the plot will hardly be satisfied with "Desert" because there is hardly any plot here, but for those who want to read slowly, enjoying every sentence and passage that makes us think about ourselves and our relation to life, those who want to get lost in the smells and sounds of a slum on the Atlantic coast or the alleys of Marseilles, "Desert" is an ideal novel.
La cultura e la guerra europee si scontrano con gli usi e i costumi dei nomadi del deserto, anno 1910.
Da questa tragedia discende in linea diretta Lalla, quintessenza della nobiltà del deserto, spirito libero, regina incompresa ed emblema dello sradicamento che colpisce tutte le culture che hanno dovuto soccombere allo strapotere e all'avidità dell'uomo bianco.
Un bellissimo romanzo, che pure, molto spesso, innervosisce per l'eccesso di pretenziosità del linguaggio, che trovo tipica di quasi tutti i romanzieri francesi, a qualsiasi genere ascrivano la loro scrittura.
Da questa tragedia discende in linea diretta Lalla, quintessenza della nobiltà del deserto, spirito libero, regina incompresa ed emblema dello sradicamento che colpisce tutte le culture che hanno dovuto soccombere allo strapotere e all'avidità dell'uomo bianco.
Un bellissimo romanzo, che pure, molto spesso, innervosisce per l'eccesso di pretenziosità del linguaggio, che trovo tipica di quasi tutti i romanzieri francesi, a qualsiasi genere ascrivano la loro scrittura.
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
Ten minutes ago I was outside watching my own shadow to see if it could move freely & of its own accord. I saw myself there, the shadow of a woman, of a man, the shadow of anyone I could've been- a sexless shadow: and I'm a small man, & his shadow is small too. The date is Dec. 18, I'm living in Tucson where the weather today has impinged to 82°F... I can hardly believe it's my Dad's birthday. No sign of winter anywhere. 🥵 Sketch exercise: Draw a snowflake erupted into flames. Better yet, fold a paper and chop it up with scissors 🪓 and overlay it on flames. 🔥
"That's the way fire is; it likes people who aren't afraid of it. So then the flame leaps up again, not very strong at first; you can barely see the tip of it glowing between the branches, then suddenly it blazes up around the whole base of the bonfire, throwing out a bright light and crackling abundantly."
Lalla Hawa is from a warrior tribe of Chleuh ppl, she really knows no nation, although her origins are in Marrakech, there thatched roof villages carved into the Atlas 🗺️ Mtns. The story of her ppl are epic, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is like a combo between Jean-Claude Izzo & the Arabian Nights. This isn't a Mediterranean detective potboiler, there is instead a juxtaposition betwixt Lalla's husband Radicz and the pernicious sweep of a black cruiser. Whatever happens to Radicz is speculative, & yet the very similitude of them, and their relation to the Ma al-Aïnine's warriors, the Berik Allah, Water 💦 of the eyes. 👀 Among them is the blind mejnoun, Nour, local snake 🐍 and scorpion tamer. I discovered that acrobats and jugglers have their own patron saint. 🤹🏻
"Those things were more beautiful when he looked at them, newer, as if no one had ever seen them before him, as in the beginning of the world."
My first impression of this author was greeted with a $20 dollar bill fold in the back. I assume it was a miner, ⛏️ who put that there, for any lucky bystander to discover, The Prospector, and I knew it deserved being read for the gratuity. And, Desert also has an amusing anecdote behind it: my second impression on Le Clézio begs the question; "Would you Like Dessert?" 🥧 Uhh... YES!!
"That's the way fire is; it likes people who aren't afraid of it. So then the flame leaps up again, not very strong at first; you can barely see the tip of it glowing between the branches, then suddenly it blazes up around the whole base of the bonfire, throwing out a bright light and crackling abundantly."
Lalla Hawa is from a warrior tribe of Chleuh ppl, she really knows no nation, although her origins are in Marrakech, there thatched roof villages carved into the Atlas 🗺️ Mtns. The story of her ppl are epic, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is like a combo between Jean-Claude Izzo & the Arabian Nights. This isn't a Mediterranean detective potboiler, there is instead a juxtaposition betwixt Lalla's husband Radicz and the pernicious sweep of a black cruiser. Whatever happens to Radicz is speculative, & yet the very similitude of them, and their relation to the Ma al-Aïnine's warriors, the Berik Allah, Water 💦 of the eyes. 👀 Among them is the blind mejnoun, Nour, local snake 🐍 and scorpion tamer. I discovered that acrobats and jugglers have their own patron saint. 🤹🏻
"Those things were more beautiful when he looked at them, newer, as if no one had ever seen them before him, as in the beginning of the world."
My first impression of this author was greeted with a $20 dollar bill fold in the back. I assume it was a miner, ⛏️ who put that there, for any lucky bystander to discover, The Prospector, and I knew it deserved being read for the gratuity. And, Desert also has an amusing anecdote behind it: my second impression on Le Clézio begs the question; "Would you Like Dessert?" 🥧 Uhh... YES!!
Reading the English translation, it's hard to say precisely whether the problem for me lay with the language in addition to the story, or just the story.
I couldn't finish this. As much as I'm intrigued by the story's premise -- the semi-nomadic Blue Men of the Sahara must confront the impact of French colonialism in early 20th century, and a young North African woman must make her way in modern day France -- it seemed the narrative was deliberately steeped in self-importance. Worse, for me there was this overblown implication of an inherent nobility and, dare I say, purity, in the lives that have been irrevocably altered (brutalized) by colonialism. Sure the desert invokes that sense of clean unadulterated living, but this was overly romanticized and the characters never felt real to me. I prefer to see people as people, i.e., flawed no matter the tragedy that has befallen them.
In other words: less flowing sand, more grit.
I couldn't finish this. As much as I'm intrigued by the story's premise -- the semi-nomadic Blue Men of the Sahara must confront the impact of French colonialism in early 20th century, and a young North African woman must make her way in modern day France -- it seemed the narrative was deliberately steeped in self-importance. Worse, for me there was this overblown implication of an inherent nobility and, dare I say, purity, in the lives that have been irrevocably altered (brutalized) by colonialism. Sure the desert invokes that sense of clean unadulterated living, but this was overly romanticized and the characters never felt real to me. I prefer to see people as people, i.e., flawed no matter the tragedy that has befallen them.
In other words: less flowing sand, more grit.