Desert (1980)
J.M.G. Le Clézio (1940)
354 pages
Nature can be astonishingly beautiful and devastatingly cruel, the difference often depending on the smallest change of circumstances. It can even be both at once: overwhelming one’s strength even as one is dazzled by its beauty. This is the view of nature experienced by the characters in J.M.G. Le Clézio’s haunting and lovely novel Desert; nature powerful and glorious, nature with the force of a separate character in the story.
The novel has two parallel story lines. One takes place in the Western Sahara desert in the early years of the 20th century, and is based on historical events of the time. The other is set in modern times, starting out near a city where the sands of the Sahara end in dunes along the Atlantic coast, before moving to the French port city of Marseille, on the Mediterranean. The two stories are interlaced in the telling, and are loosely but clearly connected to one another, the consequences of the actions of one era playing out seemingly inevitably in the next.
The novel opens in 1909, as nomadic tribes of the western Sahara are gathering together and streaming north through the desert, ahead of the advancing “Christian” armies of the European colonial powers. This part of the story is told from the point of view of Nour, a teenage boy whose family is part of the exodus. Nour watches the tribes come together around a holy man and follow him northward on a deadly search for a new home; caught between the unyielding desert sands and mountains, and the relentless armies of the Christians, Nour and his people struggle onward with little more than hope and prayer to sustain themselves. Challenged by the harsh desert and witnessing both the stalwart resolve of this fellow travelers and the dead who eventually begin to line the sides of the path north, Nour grows into a man over the months of the trip, discovering the power of faith in the face of continual loss.
The parallel, modern-day story follows another young teenager, a girl named Lalla Hawa. Lalla lives in a kind of shanty town outside a port city on the Atlantic coast of the Sahara desert. She rises above the poverty of her surroundings, seemingly fascinated by all aspects of the natural world, whether the desert landscape, the sand dunes along the coast, or the wasps hovering over the cooking food. But most especially she is enthralled with light, the light reflected off the sand, the rocks and the water. In one of the many, many beautifully written descriptions of the desert landscape in the novel, Le Clézio describes how a shepherd friend of Lalla’s leads her into
a chasm that opens at the bottom of a rocky ravine … [and] along the narrow tunnel that descends into the earth…. All of a sudden, they stop: the long tunnel is bathed in light because it opens right out into the sky… the sky right there in front of her, immense and weightless. She stands motionless, breathless, wide-eyed.
As the story develops, Lalla seems to be absorbing the light, to be illuminated by it. She moves through life with an awareness of the world that most everyone around her remains blind to. She knows, for example, that she lives in a very poor family and that there is wealth in the world --- wealth in fact just across the river in the neighboring city; she is not naïve to these facts, but this reality does not affect her appreciation of the beauty in the world around her. When a situation does finally develop that threatens to tie her down and limit her ability to follow her own will, she escapes, running away crossing the Mediterranean and ending up in Marseille. Even there, though poor, struggling to survive and missing her desert home, she nevertheless manages to find moments of inspiration even in the otherwise grimy, run-down poverty of the underside of life in the French city.
With Lalla ending up in France to try and make a life for herself the novel comes full circle in a way. The French and their fellow Europeans drove Nour and his people from their homelands and their nomadic, pastoral lifestyle. Many who survived settled in shanty towns outside of larger African cities, where they were often unable to find work on which to survive and so failed to be integrated into the local populations. In a desperate bid to make a life for themselves, some move on, across the sea, to the promised wealth of the cities of Europe, only to find the promised land a mirage, as they struggle unwanted in these new lands. Thus, Europeans reap what they have sown in colonizing Africa.
But this novel also has a powerful message of hope and inspiration. It shows the ability of people to persevere and rise above a difficult reality, making new lives for themselves that can be worth living. And too, it is a wonderful homage to the beauty of the natural world, a beauty that can be found all around us, if we only open ourselves to appreciating it. In his descriptions of nature Le Clézio’s writing verges on poetry at times, particularly when he describes Lalla’s perceptions of her desert home. When she finds herself in the middle of the desert at night, with her shepherd friend, Lalla lies on the hard ground, and though tired, sore and hungry, looks up to see
… the extremely soft light coming from the cluster of stars … [that felt] so very close, she could easily reach out her hand and take a handful of the beautiful light.
Read quotes from this book
Other reviews / information:
J.M.G. Le Clézio was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Review by Elizabeth Hawes in the New York Times Book Review that gives a little of Le Clézio’s history.
Review on the site Three Percent by Timothy Nassau.
Review on the blog Mookse and Gripes.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION
No comments:
Post a Comment