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France’s Le Clezio wins Nobel Prize for literature

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, whose vast world travels form the poetic and descriptive backdrop for his body of work, won this year’s Nobel Literature Prize yesterday.

The Swedish Academy hailed Le Clezio, 68, as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

Le Clezio, speaking to Swedish Radio, said he was “very moved.”

“It’s a great honor for me, I’m sincerely grateful to the Nobel Academy,” he said.

The newest Nobel laureate is one of the French writers best known outside his country and one of the most wide-ranging in his choice of subject matter.

The Academy cited his novel Revolutions from 2003 as summing up “the most important themes of his work: memory, exile, the reorientations of youth, cultural conflict.”

“The emphasis in Le Clezio’s work has increasingly moved in the direction of an exploration of the world of childhood and of his own family history,” it said.

Le Clezio is an avid traveler, and his fiction is as likely to be set in Mexico or the Sahara as in Paris or London.

With his first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (1963, The Interrogation), published when he was only 23, Le Clezio was seen as a newcomer to the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) movement spearheaded by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

But he defied easy classification and rapidly became a cult author, a lonely chronicler — rarely given to making public statements — of the perils of modern life, particularly its urban variety.

A passionate admirer of two other great travelers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, Le Clezio won the Renaudot award in 1963 for Le Proces-Verbal, France’s second most prestigious literary award after the Goncourt prize.

His latest novel Ritournelle de la faim (Same Old Story about Hunger) released this year has been hailed as breaking new ground, exploring French guilt over its wartime past.

The story revolves around Ethel, a young girl growing up in the French bourgeoisie whose self-satisfied existence is shattered by the war.

“Jean-Marie Le Clezio is a great French monument who towers over our literature,” critic Franz-Olivier Giesbert said.

Among the better-known of his novels are La Guerre (1970, War), Mondo (1978), Desert (1980), Le Chercheur d’Or (1985, The Prospector), Onitsha (1991) and Etoile Errante (1992, Wandering Star).
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