... literature has become a way for the men and women in our time to express their identity, to claim their right to speak, and to be heard in all their diversity. Without their voices, their call, we would live in a world of silence. ...Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature gives his lecture, speaking of his own influences and the global importance of literature in translation.
This year's Nobel Prize for literature goes to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, described but Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel judges (and the guy who ran down American authors a few days ago) as an : ... author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.According to Alison Flood in the Guardian :
Born in 1940, Le Clézio first found fame aged 23 with his debut novel Le Procès-Verbal, which was awarded the Prix Renaudot for its depiction of a young man who ends up in a mental hospital. Compared to Sartre's Nausea and Camus's The Outsider, the book introduced one of Le Clézio's major preoccupations, that of the flight from the norm to extreme states of mind. It is still regarded as one of his best pieces of writing. ... His real breakthrough as a novelist came with 1980's Désert, whose tale of a lost culture in the North African desert and a Europe seen through the eyes of immigrants won him a French Academy prize.His recent works include Ballaciner(2007) which the academy called :
... a deeply personal essay about the history of the art of filmand he has also written several books for children.
Le Clézio is regarded by many students of literature as the greatest living French writer (even though he was relatively little-read and little-discussed in France until yesterday). But he has established a worldwide reputation as a "modern Homer", a student of almost every culture on the planet, written and unwritten, and a passionate advocate for the superior wisdom of "non-rational", non-Western ways of understanding human existence. ... There are few modern writers more cosmopolitan than Le Clézio. He was born in France. His father was a Mauritian-born British doctor. He spent part of his childhood with his father in Africa and several years in the 1970s living with an Indian tribe in Panama. He now lives and teaches for most of the year in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He once said: "The French language is my only country, the only place that I call home."There's an interesting interview with the author on France Diplomatie.
Michel Houellebecq is perhaps France's most revered contemporary author but his 83 year-old mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, has now written an autobiography, L'Innocente (The Innocent One) in which she denounces her son as :... an untalented social climber whose ego is only matched by his dishonesty ...She goes on :
What are these novels where nothing ever happens? ... This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame?and she is apparently threatening to knock his teeth out with her walking stick if he mentions her again in one of his works.
Adam Sage in The Times explores the origins of the long-standing feud between the two while Angelique Chrisafis in the Guardian scoops the first British interview with Lucie.
How on earth must it feel when you accidentally kill a favourite author? When Alan Wong told me this strange story about what may have happened to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (whose The Little Prince I really loved when I read it in French at school), I told him he had to guest blog it for us. Many thanks for this Alan! :4,000 dead US soldiers in Iraq. 4,000 potentially bright futures and glorious lives tragically cut short.
It's depressing to read about people getting killed in wars. Thanks to Andrew Olmsted, you can even read what people (about to be) killed in wars have to say. The only thing supporters and detractors of war have to say is that it sucks - big time.
The story behind the fate of French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry should serves as one of the loudest ever anti-war statements. His disappearance during WW2 was one of the biggest war-time mysteries, probably after Glenn Miller's.
de Saint-Exupéry, whose works included The Little Prince, was also an aviator with a Corsican air corps, and was among those missing in action.
Historian Lino von Gartzen's investigation on the author turned up an unexpected piece of the puzzle. WW2 German ace Host Rippert put forth the possibility that he may have downed the French author's plane.French newspaper Le Figaro has published extracts of a book in which the former Messerschmitt pilot describes spotting a twin-tailed Lightning P-38 plane flying below him. He went in pursuit and shot him down.Compounding the tragedy was the fact that Rippert had been a fan of his books even before the war.
... Mr Rippert describes being a fan of de Saint-Exupery's work. "In our youth, at school, we had all read him. We loved his books," he said.Now, imagine accidentally running over somebody in the middle of a darkrainy night, only to discover the next day you had cut short the Harry Potter series. According to von Gartzen :He feels guilty and very, very sorry about it. He was very scared that the cheap press would massacre him.Such is the awful price of war. What would de Saint-Exupéry have written had he survived? How would he have changed the French literary scene? Too bad these are questions no amount of research could uncover.
France one wielded considerable clout in terms of culture and the arts; today the only kind of French-lit I recognise are the Asterix comic series. "Tragic" doesn't even come close.
de Saint-Exupéry's untimely end begs the question: How many more potential peace-time talents must be sacrificed to serve the selfish interests of a few?
