Le Clézio remembers the years he spent as a child in Nigeria and the impression the African landscapes made on him. Then he adds:
"As I write this, I understand that this goes beyond my own memory. This is also the memory from years prior to my birth, when my mom and dad wandered together on the paths of the tablelands, through the kingdoms of Western Cameroon. The memory of my father's anxiety and hopes, of his solitude and unhappiness."
There are many different sides of Le Clézio's authorship that are worth mentioning, but as I see it the lines above are central. The walls between people, between different lives and experiences are very thin. One person's memory can be someone else's.
Le Clézio's own background is very dense, culturally and geographically. The history of his family reaches from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to Nice in the South of France, and further to Nigeria where he spent some important childhood years. His Britannic ancestors emigrated to Mauritius - then known as Ile de France - in the late 18th century and were part of a second wave of French colonialists that were allowed to keep their native language even when the island came under British rule in 1810. When the family's estate went bankrupt, they returned to France, ruined.
But the global background does not end there. The African is about the strange relationship with the father, who was deeply critical of both the French and the English colonialism and took up a post as a doctor in Nigeria, where he remained during World War II, isolated from his family, a wife and two sons, who eventually ended up in Nice. The father made an attempt to reunite with his family by crossing the Sahara desert but was forced to turn back. It was not until Jean-Marie Le Clézio was eight years old that the family was reunited in Nigeria - which was too late, judging by the author's accounts.
With that kind of background, it is easy to be struck with the feeling that you don't belong anywhere. Especially in the France of the late fifties where Le Clézio became a grown man, with the colonial war in Algeria haunting an entire generation and killing several of his equally aged friends. Alienation, and the sparseness of the world surrounding the storyteller, is a recurring theme in his first novels. Not least in the 1963 debut The Interrogation (Le Procès-Verbal), where a deeply disturbed man, Adam, goes into a strange inner exile in a town in Southern France and loses himself in a psychosis. He is involuntarily committed, which coincides with Ben Bella's arrival in Oran, mentioned only in passing. It is a novel deeply influenced by Albert Camus.
Le Clézio's early prose, with its strangely objective and distant registration of events, drew many critics to label the author as one of the representatives of the "nouveau roman" (new novel), alongside writers like Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor. Usually mentioned among these "nouveau roman" writers is also Marguerite Duras (in her younger years), who had a colonial background similar to the one of Le Clézio. He has, however, always protested against being lumped together with any particular kind of group.
The sparseness found in Le Clézio's early prose is not so much a literary move as an attempt to portray an experience, a condition. Following the early books, which were described as avant-gardist", it is as if Le Clézio's prose - which includes travel accounts, essays, collections of myths and a couple of children's books - stretches like a giant sail across the world. During the middle period of his authorship evolves what can best be described as a strong ethnographic desire. It is a will to include in the writing as much as possible from all different kinds of cultural experiences.
His 1980 novel Desert parallels a nomadic girl's slightly idyllic journey through Sahara with an unhappy life in exile in Nice. In this novel, there is a clear longing for a more "authentic" or genuine life. This is a trait frequently found in writings during this literary era, not least in Bruce Chadwin, a writer that Le Clézio has quite a bit in common with. Le Clézio spent long periods of time in South America in Mexico and for a while lived with a group of Indians in Panama. He has never guarded any interests in the literary world" and has declined offers of a chair in the French Academy.
But in latter years, it is as if his writing reaches another temperature, with the different lines of his authorship linking together into a new entity. Not least is this apparent in his most successful novel these last few years, Revolutions, which came out in 2003. Here, it is all sown together - the ancestors' participation in the revolutionary war in the 1700s, the colonial life in Ile de France, the fall into life of poverty in Nice, the father's absence and France's colonial crimes, not least in Algeria on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the heavily autobiographical The African, it is among the most powerful of Le Clézio's works. While it is easy to read biographical details into his novels, Le Clézio warns against it; he is not describing his own life, he is merely "musicating" his experiences.
In Revolutions there is, as I see it, one important key scene. Jean, the novel's main character, gets into an argument with a Marxist fellow student who claims that we should live "here and now". It swears against Jean's take on life, which he has yet to put into words - that we live lives that carry on the experiences of others, we can hear their steps where we ourselves walk. That which is portrayed as rootlessness in the France he grew up in can also be read as a feeling of belonging everywhere. It is this monumental freedom that silently explodes in Le Clézio's later works.