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Oct 26, Rise rated it it was amazing. Displacement, exile, refugee crossing, ethnic cleansing.
They are the stuff of enduring human conflicts, the bane of civilization. Yet the register of his writing makes bearable the human failings and violence it seeks to redress. His prose register is poetry, but it is poetry lightened by silence and simplicity. Coetzee's eponymous novelist in Elizabeth C Displacement, exile, refugee crossing, ethnic cleansing. Coetzee's eponymous novelist in Elizabeth Costello ; "There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. His treatment of the plight of the marginalized people and their culture crosses over from place to place, from one generation to the next.
It crosses over from an individual to the collective. Hence, the gaze of a young boy is also the gaze of his tribe or clan: They were the men and women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of cloudless sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thirst of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon; accompanying them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccessible horizon.
More than anything, they bore the light of their gaze shining so brightly in the whites of their eyes. In her poem " Some People " trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh , the same perilous rhythm can be detected. Some people flee some other people. In some country under a sun and some clouds. Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles. The emptier they get, the heavier they grow. A second narrative thread of Desert tells the story of Lalla, a descendant of Nour.
Lalla's people no longer flee, but she chooses to escape her village. She runs away with a man when she was forced to marry another. The man she eloped with, "the Hartani", is a shepherd who lives like a hermit and doesn't communicate in the usual way. That is to say, he doesn't speak the same language as humans. But Lalla hears his voice inside her ears, and in his language he says very beautiful things that stir her body inwardly, that make her shudder. Maybe he speaks with the faint sound of the wind that comes from the depths of space, or else with the silence between each gust of wind.
Maybe he speaks with the words of light, words that explode in showers of sparks on the razor-edged rocks, with the words of sand, the words of pebbles that crumble into hard powder, and also the words of scorpions and snakes that leave tiny indistinct marks in the dust. He knows how to speak with all of those words, and his gaze leaps, swift as an animal, from one rock to another, shoots all the way out to the horizon in a single move, flies straight up into the sky, soaring higher than the birds. The Hartani seems to be representative of an old way of life, a simple life dependent on the natural elements, far from the priorities and demands of the city.
The only way to speak with him is to look in his eyes. She looks at him and reads the light in his black eyes, and he looks deep into her amber eyes; he doesn't only look at her face, but really deep down into her eyes, and it's as if he understands what she wants to say to him. Lalla can derive from the gaze of the Hartani the "essence" of things, maybe even those beyond the capacity of words to express. Now Lalla knows that words don't really count.
It's only what you mean to say, deep down inside, like a secret, like a prayer: And the Hartani doesn't speak in any other way; he knows how to give and receive that kind of message. So many things are conveyed through silence. Lalla didn't know that either before meeting the Hartani. Other people expect only words, or acts, proof, but the Hartani, he looks at Lalla with his handsome metallic eyes, without saying anything, and it is through the light in his eyes that you hear what he's saying, what he's asking.
This passage, obviously of well chosen words, yet offers more than evocation of words. It is in the register of invocation "like a secret, like a prayer" of a desert life, an elegy to a vanishing culture, to a threatened indigenous way of life. The novel as a whole offers a way of seeing beyond the surface of things, beyond the superficiality of words.
As a persecuted people flee the harsh distances of the desert "bundles rocking on their backs, like strange insects after a storm", , their pitiful silence seems both prayer and protest. Their quiet dignity and martyrdom provide a contrast to the people of a European city the city Lalla escaped to who are at the mercy of "immobile giants".
That city, Marseilles, is worded in void. Lalla can feel the relentless dizziness of the void entering her, as if the wind blowing in the street was part of a long spiraling movement. Maybe the wind is going to tear the roofs off the sordid houses, smash in the doors and windows, knock down the rotten walls, heave all the cars into a pile of scrap metal. It's bound to happen, because there's too much hate, too much suffering… But the big building remains standing, stunting the men in its tall silhouette.
They are the immobile giants, with bloody eyes, with cruel eyes, the giants who devour men and women. In their entrails, young women are thrown down on dirty old mattresses, and possessed in a few seconds by silent men with members as hot as pokers. Then they get dressed again and leave, and the cigarette — left burning on the edge of the table — hasn't had time to go out. Inside the devouring giants, old women lie under the weight of men who are crushing them, dirtying their yellow flesh. And so, in all of those women's wombs, the void is born, the intense and icy void that escapes from their bodies and blows like a wind along the streets and alleys, endlessly shooting out new spirals.
In this dank city, Lalla's adventures are told in descriptive words, not sacrificing the things that ought to be said, the things that count. They are words of suffering and degradation.
That is, until her transfiguration and acquisition of a new kind of power. Desert is an imagistic novel. From one exile to another, it recounts the never-ending quest for the equality of races and the security of a home. Beyond words, beyond aesthetic values, compassion resides in its pages. View all 4 comments. May 09, Ruth rated it did not like it. This book is beautifully written. The language and descriptions of the desert and its people are stunning. But I felt at a remove from the characters, separated from them as by a wall of clouds.
Could this have something to do with the translation? Or was it because there was almost no dialogue, just a monologue by an omniscient narrator who tells us what the characters are doing and what they feel? But it isn't often that I throw in the towel on a book only 10 pages from the end.
View all 6 comments. Jul 13, Judy rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: This French author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in I had never heard of him before his award, as is embarrassingly true of many of the Nobel Prize winners when they are not American or English. Recently I resolved to read at least one book of each of these writers as long as they write novels.
Having read Desert, I understand why he was awarded. The book was originally published in French by Editions Gallimard in and translated into English for release in Easily one of the most intense books I have ever read, Desert takes place in North Africa in two different time periods. The first is the very early s when many tribes, deprived of their homes and lands by European colonialists, are on a desperate march through the desert to a promised land prophesied by their most revered religious leader, Water of the Eyes.
This doomed endeavor is seen through the eyes of Nour, a young boy whose family has joined the march. Lalla is a young girl being raised in a shantytown near a coastal city in Morocco during the late 20th century. She is a descendant of Water of the Eyes, orphaned at birth.
Le livre est structure comme un va et vient, du passe au present, de l'histoire du tribu de desert, d'un point tournant a leur vie, ou elle traverse le desert, guide par leur chef spirituel religieux, dans un essai impossible d' arreter le changement commence par une modernisation colonial. Your search results for french. And, her short stint in modern Marseille. I struggled through about half of this because I was traveling and didn't have anything else to read, but I found it absolutely flat, opaque and affectless. Return to Book Page.
When the aunt that is raising her tries to arrange a marriage to an older man, Lalla runs away into the desert with her most beloved friend, a deaf mute goat herder. Later she and her aunt end up as immigrants in Marseilles, eking out a miserable existence in the most depressing area of this modern city.
The power of this book comes from Le Clezio's writing. For example, his account of a religious ceremony held with the natives and their spiritual leader awakes in the reader every impulse for spiritual freedom that mankind has ever had. The immensity and harsh beauty of the desert, its sand dunes, wind, burning sun and frigid nights, is a continuous presence throughout the story as well as a symbol of both the devastation of these characters and their deepest love.
Never again will I be able to read a novel which romanticizes immigrant life and poverty. In fact, the value of reading the literature of Europe and Asia is its ability to penetrate our very American refusal or inability I am not sure which it is to comprehend the hopeless misery and yet the essential strength of the dispossessed peoples of this earth; these victims of greed and "progress. Por um impulso, Lalla decide partir para Marselha. Desert nomads' struggle for survival and postcolonial astonishing homecoming, in beautiful prose!
Having grown up in a moderate tropical wet land and immigrated to a moderate filth of metro, I have felt the warm sand and soil, flints of hot stones reflecting light on bare feet, brazier kind of setup in winters, torrential downpours, dust storm of red soil. Once my father got caught in middle of a hailstorm, after our bullocks cart got mangled in the winds.
He walked down the last mile to home in Desert nomads' struggle for survival and postcolonial astonishing homecoming, in beautiful prose! He walked down the last mile to home in the relentless storm. He was never the same in winters after that incident. We have had unpleasant moments and memories, but they were never to the extreme of unbearable. And of course, I never have to dwell in metro's filth everyday as a higher middle-class person.
Desert has two loosely coupled plots of untamed spirits of the descendants of a desert tribe, interwoven till the end. One part of the story follows a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes traveling northwards across the Sahara desert, led by the Tuareg, "Men in blue", the last freemen fleeing from the Soldiers of Christians.
Major part of novel is the story of Lalla, an orphan girl growing in 'the Project', across the river from an unnamed Moroccan town. And, her short stint in modern Marseille. Time of the story is not mentioned, could be guessed as s. Waves of dunes, rugged hills, blazing sun, white light, high plateaus and intimate mythical connectedness of an individual's soul to the land are elaborated in this part.
This part contains some beautifully crafted passages I have never read before, such as the wandering of Lella on an unchartered high plateau - on the night the wind of ill fortune flows on the Project, her wanderings in the filth and coastal parts of Marseille etc. The prose is poetical, descriptions are beautiful. The English translation is flawless, from a reader's perspective for whom English is only a second language. May 04, Rosana rated it it was amazing Shelves: I had never heard of Le Clezio until he won the Nobel in , then when I bought the book a few months later, it was not the Noble prize that compelled me, but the picture on the cover of the verbamundi hardcover edition— an enigmatic woman with a blue veil.
It First the confession: It also requires the same patience and attention. Readers who crave plot should be warned that this is probably not a book for you. Le Clezio is a master of description. The desert, a slum in Morocco and the streets of Marseille all comes alive, but their hues and smells and the people populating them take shape slowly and hazily. If I stay with the idea of painting with words, I would say that Le Clezio is an impressionist painter at that.
His writing reminded me of, the also Nobel Prize winner, Kawabata.
I will attempt to read other books by Le Clezio, but I probably will wait a while. If Desert is a sample of how he writes, he is an author that demands a certain mood and commitment from his reader. But Lalla returns to the desert and the slum to bring into the world the child she made with Le Hartani and to rediscover the ineffable brilliance of a certain way of looking.
Not only is time assimilated to space, being invariable and fixed, but it represents an acme: Beings are not distinct from each other. In his role as guide, Nour follows in the footsteps of his father, the man with the rifle. They are not separated from the animals, because they have the same needs - rest, hunger, thirst — nor are they separated from the elements, reduced to a minimum: God and the saints are consulted and answer. This narrative contrasts with the novelistic part of the work in which the individual characters stand out and do not fit in with the rest of society.
Still, it is not all black and white. The epic of the Blue Men that frames the story of Lalla is not neatly resolved: Conversely, the novel is penetrated by the epic, if only by the appearance to Lalla of Es Ser which seems the reincarnation of the spiritual master Al Azraq, and more strongly by the tale that Amma tells of her origins.
She is thought to be from the lineage of Al Azraq. On the other hand, the Hartani, the initiator, through the accumulation of his gifts and his extraordinary powers, also seems to come from the epic, to be fleeing the real. With him, the world becomes flesh, begins to throb.
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This intensity of being, this renewal of life that is accorded things through sight, hearing, smell and touch, give the hero an increased, even paroxysmal awareness of his existence and the universe. The sun beat down on them as it did on the red stones of the path, and they received a real beating. The women had no shoes, and their bare feet were burned form the sand and eaten away wit the salt.
Not one of them spoke or sang. No one cried or moaned. To combat complete fatigue of the reader, he introduces Lalla, a young girl living in the slums of Tangier as a descendant of the blue men. This is where nature becomes cleansing,vivifying and spiritual. Lalla does not go to school. She does not read or write. Instead she wonders her countryside jumping dunes, laying on the white sand and running along with the wind, breathing in its rhythm and essence.
She lets the sun edify her, erasing her hunger and loneliness, inhaling it as if it were the source of life itself. She befriends flies and wasps, recognizing their role in the cycle of life and she finds comfort and solitude in the sea and the freedom it offers. The in goes farther out, toward the horizon, gets lost out at sea on the mighty waves, it carries the clouds and the sand toward the rocky coasts on the other side of the sea, toward the vast deltas where the smokestacks of the refineries are burning.
Lalla lives with her Aunt Aamma. Lalla has friends like the shepherd boy, the Hartani, who does not speak and the fisherman, Naman, who regales her stories of all the places where he has traveled. There is al-Ser, which stands for the Secret, a spirit she visits in the middle of the desert who fills her with an overwhelming sense of well-being and becomes her spiritual guide. After an attempt by her aunt to arrange a marriage for her, Lalla leaves with the Hartani to escape her destiny. The Hartani and Lalla become separated and Lalla ends up months later in Marseilles, where her aunt has already situated herself in one of the immigrant tenement housing projects.
Lalla finds work and befriends a gypsy teenager, Radicz, who steals for a living. She goes through life like the wind, without a true purpose, flowing in any direction that pulls her. But the freedom and solitude that nature offers her are the only real things that compel her to thrive. Eventually she returns to Tangier to give birth to the son of the Hartani in the vast landscape of Morocco with its promise of peace and independence. Lalla and Nour listen to the earth for answers, sustenance and portents.
The wind, the sun and the sea do not control their lives, but they pulse within their blood and live within their hearts. But the hunger for power slowly wipes clean the slate of ethnic diversity. Jan 06, Helena K. Mar 23, Louisa rated it really liked it Shelves: In the beginning there were the nomads, men and women whose faces and bodies were tinted blue with indigo and sweat Lalla is a descendent of Nour's tribe, a little orphaned girl who is fascinated by the creatures of the desert; the insects, the ants, even the flies.
In the shade of a tall fig tree, she listens to the stories told to her by an old fisherman about her ancestors, and about places and cities far away, in the north. Fleeing to escape an early marriage, Lalla makes the journey to France, where she discovers that life in the city isn't quite as beautiful as the old fisherman had led her to believe. When she finally returns to her fig tree in the desert, it is as if she had never left. May 07, Lada rated it it was amazing.
Qu'est ce que je pense de ce livre ecrit en qui est une spiritualite interieure, un chemin personnel dans le monde des annees 80 devenu de plus plus utilitaire et mercantile. L'ecrivain aide par son epouse marocaine, Jemia traverse l'ocean de desert a la recherchew d'un calme interieur qu'une curiosite avive en lui a l'ecoute du bruissement des choses de la terre autour de luiqui suscite, avive et aiguise son interet devant son identite et ce par rapport aux autres.
Le livre est structure co Qu'est ce que je pense de ce livre ecrit en qui est une spiritualite interieure, un chemin personnel dans le monde des annees 80 devenu de plus plus utilitaire et mercantile. Le livre est structure comme un va et vient, du passe au present, de l'histoire du tribu de desert, d'un point tournant a leur vie, ou elle traverse le desert, guide par leur chef spirituel religieux, dans un essai impossible d' arreter le changement commence par une modernisation colonial.
Une epreuve surhumaine, un mythe d'origine qui se revele un desastre mais portant en lui une lueur d'espoir quoique faible et qui aidera les survivants jeunes a suivre et faire attendre le temps d'assumer leur destin propre Le moment present relate l'histoire d'une jeune fille, descendante de la tribu, la jeune Lalla qui orpheline et fille de desert mene une vie toute a son interieur vivant dans une bidovville e avec sa tante et sa famille est attiree par le secret du desert et les histoire de sa tribu et de son ancetre.
La bas elle prend connaissance de la force de l'identite face a la terre et au territoire aide par un double a lui jeune garcon sourd-muet, Hartani, et un peu medjnoun, etre venu de nulle part, pose au bord d-un puits par un guerrier du desert et il enseigne Lalla l'amour de desert et comme l'amour de son prochain et pareil de L'Autre. Separe de lui dans un parcours a travers desert et venue en ville Lalla traverse son desert spirituel en memme temps et a travers le traversee par le Bateau et a Marseille puis a Paris elle reussit a garder sa foi et sa religiosite de tribu du a son eneignement du desert qui luia enseigne les vraies valeurs.
Elle quitte cette vie contemporaine pour donner naissance a la fille, sa fille et la fille de Harnani, son eoux spirituel, son double, son ami de desert. Elle donne naissance a sa fille un matin sous un figuier come tant de femmes traditionnelles de sa tribu. Sep 27, Jesse K rated it it was amazing Shelves: Desert was an amazing book.
It was published 7 years after the Giants, but it seems like it was written 40 years later by an entirely different man. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Le Clezio still employs alot of the same tricks like long descriptions of people walking and minute objects. The first 7 of hi Desert was an amazing book. The first 7 of his books seemed to be a sort of mad scream about something awful whereas Desert seemed to be an actual attempt to depict that which so horrified the author. In the first 7 he pulled out all of the pyrotechnic literary tricks, whereas he did more with less in Desert.
I can't objectively say which style of his is better. His first 7 books blew my mind. Desert made me cry. Take from that what you will. Either way, they're all worth reading. I took quite a long time to read this book. Not that the writing is that difficult to read, but the author doesn't exactly narrate a lot of action. The first thing that I loved about it was the setting of the story. Even in my bed, no sound around the house, I could feel the wind, the sun on my skin. I've definitely been transported by it. Two stories are assembled, but as there's not a lot of action, and as the characters are rea I took quite a long time to read this book.
Two stories are assembled, but as there's not a lot of action, and as the characters are really different you have no problem in telling when you switch story. I'm left with a bittersweet feeling as I close this book. I've traveled, I've thought about a lot of things, and the end feel bitter to me. It was a really moving book, that made me thought about how perceptions can differ depending on where we were born, and how we're raised, what virtues are taught to us et cetera.
Aug 16, Suraj Alva rated it it was ok. Was reading this book in French and not a translation, got to page 70 and couldn't take it anymore. It is too effing repetitive, the author just labors on and on and on and on, on unnecessary and redundant details; so much so that you feel as if he got his money per the number of pages he wrote.
I struggled through about half of this because I was traveling and didn't have anything else to read, but I found it absolutely flat, opaque and affectless. Wondering if I'd missed something through lack of attention, when I got back to Australia I gave it to my dad to read, and his response was the same, despite his tastes being fairly different to mine.
This just seems a clear case of overreach: Le Clezio doesn't have the requisite empathy with his mostly black, African, poor characters and I struggled through about half of this because I was traveling and didn't have anything else to read, but I found it absolutely flat, opaque and affectless. Le Clezio doesn't have the requisite empathy with his mostly black, African, poor characters and the result is tedious and empty.
Or so it seems to me. Mar 13, Mehdi Jemaa rated it it was ok Shelves: Two linked stories about tradition and progress and what we as a civilisation have come to sacrifice to get where we are. Beginning of the twentieth century, Nour, one of the last of a disappearing tribe who have to start a migration through the desert to find their homeland. Lalla, the descendant of that now disappeared tribe, who has to take her own journey to find what's lacking in her life. Prose which should be read as poetry, through the senses. I think that if you try to read this novel in Two linked stories about tradition and progress and what we as a civilisation have come to sacrifice to get where we are.
I think that if you try to read this novel in the traditional sense, you won't be very satisfied with the experience. There's a plot to follow, but sometimes great important facts seem to be omitted whereas details such as the smell of the sand or the texture of some clothes or the warm and salty water of a particular beach are described for pages and pages.
You have to feel more than to read this novel. It reminded me of Woolf's writing style, dense, subtle, elegant and poetic.
May 30, Jane rated it really liked it Shelves: The absolutely stunning descriptive passages were slow and lyrical. I felt through everything I was watching a movie, not reading a book. The author's power of words was amazingly vivid, even in translation. This is the story of the desert in North Africa, the near wiping out of the whole Tuareg nation [a nomadic tribe, the so-called "blue men"] told through the story of Nour, a Tuareg boy, and the forced march he and his people endure in This story alternates with that of Lalla, in the pr The absolutely stunning descriptive passages were slow and lyrical.
This story alternates with that of Lalla, in the present. She runs away from home to avoid being forced into marriage. The story also recounts the bitterness of the immigrant experience in Marseilles. I am perplexed by Le Clezio's "Desert"; it is so beautifully written that it actually becomes mesmerizing. Such mastery of language in the most classical sense I could not help sensing some strong Proustian affinities! Yet, I also felt the book was so strangely empty; the thought dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, Le Clezio engineered that emptiness to reflect the vast empty horizon of the desert itself.
Apr 15, I Am rated it liked it. Jul 06, Igor rated it it was amazing Shelves: Sensaciones arenosas garantizadas -en el mejor de los sentidos-. Apr 18, Aaron Cance rated it it was amazing. A handsomely written, sprawling epic that chronicles the slow death of a North African culture. Jan 06, Oxana Gutu rated it it was amazing. Le Clezio received the Nobel prize for literature in DesertClezio The desert appeared to me as a metaphor for human misery and emptiness, but also for wholeness and its intrinsic happiness.
The human misery and happiness are told through stories of descendants of a man believed to be holy by his North African nomadic people. It is such a beautiful story that I read it every time I wanted to escape the daily routine. Lala takes you places. I loved to read it on my flights back home and to be mentally in the places Lala took me and see what she saw from the harshness of the desert to the brutality of the streets of Marseille inhabited by the once nomadic by lifestyle or spirit people, and further to the glamorous life of the most photographed face.
It is also symbolic for a group of people affected by colonisation and its consequences. Desert signAs if harshness breeds love, Lala, also called Hawa, who cannot write, adopted a small heart as her signature. Lala, also called Hawa, is a gift of love. If you try to find out who she is her answers will teach you a thing or two on humbleness. Le Clezio amazed me with the pallet of styles he interchanges smoothly, softly, delightfully. I loved the book as it created a refuge for me from daily noise.
I was almost upset, when the story took the turn of war and fights.