Wandering Star [antikvár]

Foreword by Adam Gopnik When J.M.G Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008, few Americans had heard his name or knew much about his writing. This was partly a reflection on the insularity of American criticism, and American publishing as well, not made better by some pettish complaints about the neglect of "our" boys (and girls). But it was partly because Le Clézio, without being at all obscure, is nonetheless a "difficult" writer, even for the French—not a hard writer to read, at all, but one whose preoccupations and point of view are so oddly original that it is easy to miss the point of what he is doing even when one is, so to speak, right on the edge of his rapier. Difficult, not because his prose is too cryptic or strange—it has a classical and even poise and a smooth, at times almost murmuring, tenor—but because his vision of the world is an unusual mix of things: his cool, almost detached descriptive particularism exists alongside a universalist, moralizing preoccupation with the problem of violence. A child of the Second World War, his earliest memories are of a Canadian bomb falling with concussive horror on his family's hiding place in the Pyrenees—it is the child's experience of war, at once baffled and bemused, that attracts him. In a larger sense, the idea of watchfulness, of bearing witness rather than registering emotion, is at the heart of all he does and writes. His narrative voice