DESERT
By J. M. G. Le Clézio
Translated by C. Dickson
352 pp. Verba Mundi/David R. Godine. $25.95
Le Clézio has a Moroccan family and spends much of his time in the desert with the Touareg. His understanding of the desert and its peoples is compassionate and intense and you never doubt that his characters are all real and part of his actual life. (Also see his beautiful collaboration with Jémia, his lovely Moroccan wife and Bruno Barbey in their book Maroc )This excerpt from the review by Elizabeth Hawes in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times :
“Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille. His central characters are the stalwart young boy Nour, who in 1909 is migrating north across the Western Sahara in
a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy, copper-skinned young orphan named Lalla, descended from the blue men, whose parentage helps her survive immigrant life in the 1970s. There are secondary characters, historical figures like the legendary sheik Ma al-Ainine, revered by his people and demonized as a fanatic by the French, and such fablelike creations as Lalla’s two kindred spirits (the Hartani, a mute shepherd who can communicate with animals, and Naman, the old fisherman who tells her wise stories) or the pretty Gypsy boy Radicz, who is being trained as a thief on the streets of Marseille. In an important way, however, the presiding force of “Desert” is the land itself. As the omission of the definite article in the title seems to suggest, the desert, the jagged rocks and blistering heat, the maze of dunes, the waves of open space, “timeless,” “deep in their bodies,” is not only a setting, but also a kingdom, a resource and a state of mind.
“Desert” moves slowly, its pace set in the beginning by the tortuous trek across the Sahara and by Le Clézio’s way with language — the minutely detailed descriptions of the suffering, the recurring images of the sky, birds, the wind and light, the long waves of insistent prose designed to saturate and surround, like music. Repetitions are deliberate, rhythmic, metaphors are meant to enlighten and reflect. “Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.” Le Clézio is writing about people who are close to the earth and sea, whose stories come from there, and at the same time about the vast epic of nature and its sustaining force. The connection between the land and all its creatures, humans, plants, animals, insects, has been a passionate theme in Le Clézio’s later work, and it is the lesson of Nour and more directly Lalla, who, to escape the harsh realities of her life, inhabits the mystical world of her ancestors, fed by visions of whirling winds and glistening sand and her communion with al-Ser, the spirit of the blue man warrior, “a dream that has come from afar.” He has the light of the desert in his eyes, as Lalla does too, which helps account for her success as the international fashion model Hawa — a career she abandons to return to her old neighborhood in Tangier and give birth.
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