Desert
JMG Le Clézio, C Dickson (trs.)
Desert
It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's north African desert tribe - the Blue Men - are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men - a girl called Lalla - is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe - and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life - as a hotel maid - and the material prosperity of those who succeed - when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors.
4.7 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
368 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
February 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-1848873797 |
| Publisher |
Atlantic |
| |
It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's north African desert tribe - the Blue Men - are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great spiritual leader. The holy man sends them even further from home, on an epic journey northward, in the hope of finding a land in which they can again be free. Decades later, an orphaned descendant of the Blue Men - a girl called Lalla - is living in a shantytown on the coast of Morocco. Lalla has inherited both the pride and the resilience of her tribe - and she will need them, as she makes a bid to escape her forced marriage to a wealthy older man. She flees to Marseilles, where she experiences both the hardships of immigrant life - as a hotel maid - and the material prosperity of those who succeed - when she becomes a successful model. And yet Lalla does not betray the legacy of her ancestors.
First published in France in 1980. This is the first English translation.
Read an extract from the book on the New York Times website
Reviews
The Financial Times
Andrew Hussey
"This is one of Le Clézio’s major works and, despite the novel’s relative antiquity, it stands up remarkably well to 21st-century scrutiny. Most crucially, it reveals the history of colonial France in the Arab world as a deep-layered series of narratives which have yet to be properly understood in France or, indeed, the wider world."
28/02/2010
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The New York Times
Elizabeth Hawes
"A rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio... Beneath his pantheism and ethnology, there is also a serious critic of contemporary Western civilization and its rationalism, pointing out the conflict between nature and cities, the disconnect between man and mythology."
28/02/2010
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The Times
Douglas Kennedy
"Though epic in its scope — and scathing in its condemnation of colonialism’s relentless, bulldozer-like effect on indigenous peoples — the novel’s greatest strength (and its greatest challenge for the reader) is its granitic pacing, its relentless descriptive involvement with the sky above, the white-hot sand below. The end result: a book one must admire for its profound seriousness, for its scorched-earth poetics and for its rendering of a lost world. But before embarking on the journey, do remember this: M. Le Clézio demands much from his readers ... most especially, patience."
13/02/2010
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