[stadiaKab]

Le Clezio, the 2008 Nobel laureate, hailed by the committee as "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," chronicler of the age of globalization, was once a different kind of writer - the bright young talent of the French "New Novelists" who scorned plot and character and oldfashioned outmoded things. The Book of Flights, written in Le Clezio's angry young man period, is true to form. Though there is a character of sorts - a Young Man Hogan, often Y. M. Hogan, or simply YMH - he doesn't interest Le Clezio very much, other than a convenient figure to ping the authors' opinions and his frequent screeds against the modern era off of.

I bought the book for three reasons: 1) its title I like very much, 2) because I could not find a single review of it online, except a sole writeup by some genius on Amazon UK titled "Pretentious Crap," and 3) because of the jacket blurb, which read: "Full of fun and poetry... one of the most delightful and engaging experimental French novelists." Since what I'd read and heard of young Le Clezio - that dour and humorless were the order of the day - I wanted to find out what a Le Clezio "full of fun and poetry" might be like. Jacket blurbs can be misleading, but rare to find one so hilariously off-base (Was the Sunday Times reviewer drunk? Had he read the same book?). Whatever The Book of Flights may be, it is not the slightest bit fun.

I was reading The Book of Flights at the same time as Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands and thinking What would Thesiger, that hard old tortoise who'd traversed those pitiless deserts in his bare feet, make of this young Frenchman and his jeremiads on the impotence of literature? Like the dullard who took thirty seconds to crank out his online "review" of The Book of Flights, I imagine Thesiger might also suggest using the book for kindling. However, Thesiger and Le Clezio have more in common than meets the eye. Certainly they could agree on one thing: that the modern world is rubbish.

At the beginning of Flights finds YMH in "a sort of vast necropolis." From here he journeys (or, rather, the flights of the title - flights as in fleeing) across other landscapes, seldom given much to differentiate them - though if one has a knack for geography there are indicators that YMH follows a course, through Africa, Asia ("on the Ayutthaya road" - almost next door to where I live), and North America, terminating in South America. The character - the author - doesn't seem to relish these travels much, they only serve in a vague sense as further points in the series of flights (the "necropolis" presumably representing the Western World).

But this is not Le Clezio's travel book, it is his book about that oft-tackled writerly subject: being a writer. Young Man's journeys are frequently punctuated with chapters titled SELF CRITICISM, in which Le Clezio grapples (as writers do, as you know) with the writer's sense of purposelessness:

Can anything be more wretched than writing for one's own pleasure? Writing so as to re-read oneself in a glow of self-satisfaction, playing tricks with words, playing tricks with memory, allusions: eyes, that is what must be liquidated, once and for all! Who cares about my mother, my birth, my gastric troubles!

At one point it dawns on Young Man: I know, now, what I am fleeing from: emptiness.

While I have sympathy for Le Clezio's thoughts on the futility of writing and the emptiness of the modern world, they are, at times, frankly banal. Yet I liked the book, for reasons that are difficult for me to pin down. He does have strokes of real poetry (though it's inevitably dark), and some passages have a genuine, chilling beauty to them:

Y. M. could see two women in front of a bookshop on the other side of the street. They were standing there on the sidewalk, one beside the other, waiting. They were both very young, they were beautiful, and they looked highly respectable. Wearing lovely costumes, gold and silver jewellery. They had intelligent, refined features, innocent eyes, smartly styled hair. From time to time, they spoke to each other and laughed, one could hear their high-pitched voices bursting into the laughter of young girls who have scarcely attained puberty. Delicate hands, delicate smiles, graceful, supple bodies. Their movements were full of elegance, as they crossed their long legs, tugged at the shoulder-straps of their handbags, played with a necklace or a bracelet. Faces full of grace and modesty, necks set haughtily, aloof expressions. The light from the shop windows enveloped them in its halo, made them almost transparent. And when a man passed, some portly gentleman with a portruding stomach and bald pate, his breath reeking of cigars and wine, they tilted their heads a little to one side, and without a word, with their eyes alone, offered themselves for sale.

.................................................. ..........

Though Le Clezio's Young Man is "travelling, urged on by hatred," the author lets slip rare moments, despite himself, of... not quite joy, but something close to contentment. For instance, in my baffling, beloved Siam, Le Clezio ruminates:

Exoticism is a vice, because it is a way of forgetting the true aim of all quests, self-awareness. It is an invention of the white man, bound up in his mercantile conception of culture. This desire to possess is sterile. There can be no compromise: anyone who seeks to arrogate to himself the soul of a nation by nibbling away at it, by hoarding sensations or ideas, is incapable of knowing the world; is incapable of knowing himself. Reality is not to be won on those terms. It demands humility.

This country should be loved in another manner. It should be loved not because it is different, or distant (distant from what?) but because it is a country that does not allow itself to be possessed easily; because it is a country that defends itself against intrusion, because it is an inner truth that I shall doubtless never know.

(Ah, to have been in Thailand in 1969 before the conquest of crass American shoppingmallism!)

The war in Vietnam, raging at the time of the writing of The Book of Flights, is conspicuously absent from the text, but must have been burning away in Le Clezio's mind while writing the book: the American war was simply a disgusting, shameless extention of the disgusting, shameless legacy of the French occupation of that country. In the closing chapters of the book, Le Clezio takes time out to damn the entire white race:

Is it my fault if I belong to the race of thieves? The white man has always stolen everything from everyone. From the Jews, Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes, Aztecs, Japanese, Balinese. When he has had his fill of stealing territories and slaves, the white man has begun stealing cultures. He has stolen religion from the Jews, science from the Arabs, literature from the Hindus. When he finished stealing the bodies of Negroes, he stole their music, their dances, their art. When the Christian religion, a religion that became contemptible, a religion for philistines, no longer satisfied him, he turned back towards the religion of India... And when the conquered people has nothing left, when the white man has despoiled and enslaved, when he has destroyed the people's language and faith, when he has evicted him from his best lands, when he has forced him to taste poverty, the real poverty of the white man; when he has ruined his race by stealing the women, when he has turned it into a tribe of servants at his beck and call, the white man still feels dissatisfied with his achievements.

Le Clezio chooses to end his book with an idyll that slowly lapses into a nightmare scenario, as Young Man claims he has finally found peace (I do not think I shall ever flee again) in a small South American town, only to see it revealed as a "calm and tranquil" horror upon closer inspection. It is a fitting shadow to finally cast over this decidedly un-fun, anti-fun book, the work of an author struggling with his own doubts and darknesses, struggling to find an adequate form - and here not quite succeeding, but perhaps the condescending consolations noble failure and worthy effort can be trotted out - an author who asks himself via his non-character, waiting for a bus at the book's close, the next flight, Am I myself transporting emptiness wherever I go?