LOGO
Reply to Thread New Thread
Old 10-16-2008, 05:14 AM   #1
Gymnarnemia

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
523
Senior Member
Default J.M.G. Le Cl?zio: Terra Amata
The architect Le Corbusier reportedly said that God was in the details; others have claimed the same about the devil. And it's in the details that Le Cl?zio finds Terra Amata ("the beloved Earth", if my Latin serves); whether what he finds is God or Devil...

This is the first Le Cl?zio I've read, and supposedly not the best starting point - most people who have read him suggest his debut Le Proc?s-Verbal (The Interrogation) as a sampler of his early avant-garde work, but this was the one that was still in the library, and I can't say it's scared me off further exploration. In fact, I liked it a lot.

Terra Amata is, in its way, a very bare-bones thing. It's the story of the life of a man named Chancelade (de la chance?), from his early childhood to his grave. And it's not like his life is all that special; he's a pretty ordinary guy, and not much out of the ordinary ever happens to him. What makes it more than just boring ultra-realism is how the story is told. See, Chancelade likes details. Right from the beginning, even as a small child, we see him extrapolating entire worlds from the smallest things, trying to understand his world by submerging himself in it, trying to put words to everything he sees and feels... the whole "cosmos in a grain of sand" bit. You should be everywhere at the same time, on the mountaintops when the aurora borealis flares up, in the depths of the sea by the volcanos' mute explosions, in the trunks of the trees when the rain slowly starts falling and each drop detonates on each leaf. Le Cl?zio's world isn't a cold, inhospitable place; it's a world that's teeming with beauty, and Chancelade wanders through it in constant infatuation, as if drunk on everything's existence and becoming. At times, this is a horriffic experience - anyone who's read The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy might compare it to the Total Perspective Vortex: if you see how insignificant you seem in the vastness of the world, you're supposed to go crazy. Except he doesn't, not really; he just has to find a way to live this incredible thrill ride of sensory overload that even an ordinary life can be. The world was too alive, you couldn't defeat it. Space had too much space, time too many seconds, days, weeks, milennia. You could no longer do anything to understand. You could no longer meet the frightening gaze of the absolute. (...) You had to dive head-first into vertigo and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, give birth (...) because there was nothing else to do. Writing something that goes more or less like this for 220 pages (well OK, there is ordinary life and dialogue and other characters in there too) requires a lot of the author, but the young Le Cl?zio is up to it - with a few notable snags; when Chancelade falls in love, he spends a few short chapters speaking in sign language, morse code and invented languages to try and express his inner turmoil... which, nah. But even then, the prose is... precise. I've rarely come across a writer who's this good at navigating rather complex existential morasses with a language that's this clear, vivid and, well... fun; like I've said elsewhere, I'm occasionally reminded of the extatic free-form prose of Clarice Lispector, while the slight meta-fictional overtones call Perec or Calvino to mind. OK, so the novel tends to crawl up its own ass a few times - I suppose you can only write so much about the experience of everyday mundanity, and the pro- and epilogues that talk directly to the reader don't really do it any favours. But most of the time, it's a real joy to read. As in life, you take the bad with the good, hope the latter outweighs the former, hold on in the sharp curves and feel the tickle in your belly. Nerves, nerves everywhere.

NOTE: All quotes translated by me from the Swedish translation. My apologies to M Le Cl?zio and his English translator.
Gymnarnemia is offline


Old 10-16-2008, 05:45 AM   #2
ehib8yPc

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
564
Senior Member
Default
Bj?rn, I'm glad someone's already reading Le Cl?zio. Your remarks sound encouraging, just like the articles I read last Friday in the French and Belgian press on him.

I shall tackle a Le Cl?zio sometime. The shops will be full of them now, but when the hue and cry has died down a bit, I'll no doubt be able to find a slightly dog-eared, and cheap, copy in a second-hand bookshop somewhere.
ehib8yPc is offline


Old 10-16-2008, 06:33 AM   #3
Gymnarnemia

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
523
Senior Member
Default
I definitely plan to read more of him too, though it'll probably have to wait a bit; over here he's published by a very small publisher - essentially a one-woman operation - which is fun for her, but it also means that his books aren't likely to show up in paperback anytime soon, and their regular editions are expensive. But especially R?volutions looks very interesting.

Incidentally, here's a very interesting essay on Terra Amata.
Gymnarnemia is offline


Old 10-16-2008, 07:52 AM   #4
ehib8yPc

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
564
Senior Member
Default
I've printed it out to read in an armchair. I note that it's from 1999. Chancelade is an intriguing name, implying vacillation, wobbling, swaying (French: chanceler).
ehib8yPc is offline


Old 10-16-2008, 09:15 PM   #5
AM1VV9r6

Join Date
Nov 2005
Posts
445
Senior Member
Default
Nice review Bjorn,and has i got Le Proc?s-Verbal I shall put it next on my reading list.
I finished Mondo a few days.It is the story of a vagrant boy in some south americain town(a guess),and the people he meets,his contemplative life.Mondo ask people he likes to adopte him without waiting for their answer,avoid been picked up by the social services,and befriend charactere on the marge of normal life.
The writing has Bjorn point out,is clear and fantasmatic at the same time.I would guess more so in Mondo for short stories welcome more stylistic exercices.
I look forward to read Le Proc?s-Verbal for a novel might give me a fuller view on LeCleziot penmanship.
AM1VV9r6 is offline


Old 12-03-2008, 05:38 PM   #6
OvDojQXN

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
457
Senior Member
Default
This is the first Le Cl?zio I've read, and supposedly not the best starting point - most people who have read him suggest his debut Le Proc?s-Verbal (The Interrogation) as a sampler of his early avant-garde work...
I started The Interrogation earlier in the week, decided it wasn't suited to the stop start effect of a bus journey and set it aside for another day. Truth be told, I was finding it hard to concentrate and by the end of the first chapter I knew I'd had to go back and read it again to pick up everything I'd missed. Emphasis on everything.

So I started Terra Amata today on the grounds that it's the smallest of the eight Le Cl?zio books (seven novels, one of short stories) I've picked up recently. You're not wrong about the details - the book is swimming in them. The scene where all of nature has its names, on writing the history of the world is wonderful, and the opening Chancelade scene playing God to beetles is fun, in the way that pulling the legs off insects, back in the day, was fun.
OvDojQXN is offline


Old 12-05-2008, 06:56 AM   #7
OvDojQXN

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
457
Senior Member
Default
NOTE: All quotes translated by me from the Swedish translation. My apologies to M Le Cl?zio and his English translator.
I got lost in the book and returned to the start. Turns out I'd missed an important line that, had I caught it, I would have saved myself a few pages' simultaneous reading and head-scratching.

But, your translation above, the first one anyway, was:

You should be everywhere at the same time, on the mountaintops when the aurora borealis flares up, in the depths of the sea by the volcanos' mute explosions, in the trunks of the trees when the rain slowly starts falling and each drop detonates on each leaf.
Here's how the translator, Barbara Bray, put it:
You'd need to be everywhere at once, on the tops of the mountains when the Northern Lights appear, at the bottom of the sea for the silent explosions of volcanoes, inside the trunks of trees when the rain begins to plop gently down on every leaf.
The interesting difference is the raindrops, where you have it detonating and Bray's "plops gently".

If I come across the second quote, I'll post what Bray put too.
OvDojQXN is offline


Old 12-08-2008, 03:33 AM   #8
OvDojQXN

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
457
Senior Member
Default
Here's my scribble on the book:

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl?zio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It?s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Cl?zio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as ?author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization?- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn?t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It?s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.You?d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade?s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (?When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs? god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.?) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father?s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Cl?zio?s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.What?s interesting about Le Cl?zio?s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There?s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Cl?zio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind?s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Cl?zio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there?s the feeling that he?s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There?s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino?s If On A Winter?s Night A Traveler, but doesn?t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that?? on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Cl?zio may be an ?author of new departures? but he?s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.
OvDojQXN is offline


Old 12-09-2008, 09:40 AM   #9
KlaraNovikoffa

Join Date
Oct 2005
Location
USA
Posts
430
Senior Member
Default
Stewart,
You wrote a beautiful review! Nice quotes, too. I've just ordered Terra Amata from the library. This will be my first excursion into Le Clezio's work. The fact that the book conveys the message that life is an adventure to be lived fully makes it sound very appealing to me. Life ought to be celebrated!!

~Titania
KlaraNovikoffa is offline


Old 02-10-2009, 10:44 AM   #10
Trebbinsa

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
457
Senior Member
Default
This was my second Le Cl?zio book. Terra Amata, the Beloved Earth, is daunting. I would not recommend this as a starting point to reading Le Cl?zio's works. It deeply troubled me, depressed me, made me close my eyes for a while and try not to think.

The beginning had an interesting scene when the young protagonist, Chancelade, plays with a bunch of potato bugs. It was a riveting scene that ended in tragedy.

The book follows Chancelade throughout his entire life as the headings of the chapters may indicate:

On the earth by chance
I was born
a living man
I grew up
inside the drawing
the days went by
and the nights
I played all those games
loved
happy
I spoke all those languages
gesticulating
saying incomprehensible words
or asking indiscreet questions
in a region that resembled hell
I peopled the earth
to conquer the silence
to tell the whole truth
I lived in the immensity of consciousness
I ran away
then I grew old
I died
and was buried


This is an experimental novel reminding me a little of Italo Calvino. There was a section written in morse code, a section in sign language, C: Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up. This scene went on for 5 pages. And of course in the section called 'saying incomprehensible words' the dialog was something like this, "Woolikanok mana bori ocklakokok. Zane prestil zani wang don bang."

But even with it's quirky (yet effective) 'tricks', I found the book deeply depressing. The section 'I died' ripped me. I felt it was I breathing that last death rattle. And when I was finally buried, only then did I sigh with a bit of relief... at finishing this book.

We are in the details. We are that pebble on the beach, the heart that was pierced on the battle field in 1812, the potato bug walking aimlessly around the sidewalk, we are the words of this book, the sun, the stars, the mole under the girls left breast, and that layer of rock between the granite and flint. This book is full of details.

I think having a beer with Le Cl?zio back in 1963 may have been a downer. But then, I am beer also, and I am the belch of relief after having one too many.

I gave it 4 stars for successfully messing with my head.
Trebbinsa is offline


Old 04-04-2009, 10:28 AM   #11
SusanSazzios

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
632
Senior Member
Default
This was completely different from Onitsha, the first Le Clezio novel I read.

I think Le Clezio became less experimental and more of a storyteller as the years went by. I couldn't read every word, or even every page of this incredibly dense little novel. It has all of life in it, as does Chancelade and, Le Clezio would have us realise, all of us. There is an immense sense of the beauty of the living universe and the worth of every individual life that is certainly mirrored in the more conventionaly narrated and overtly socially and politically engaged Onitsha. It's interesting to compare how Le Clezio's very considerable lyrical skills are used all over the place, are the mode of expression here, and are interespersed more subtly in the latter novel. There is a similar episode with a boy and insects in both books, it would be worth comparing the two to see how he has grown as a writer.

I've always believed that experimental writing is alright for testing the waters and diving in to bring back unique experiences and techniques, but a good novelist will eventually find a way to incorporate well-rounded accesible narratives with his stylistic and philosophical bent; Le Clezio seems to have done over time. (I still sometimes resent Burroughs, the most self-critical and mature, arguably the most talented and humane of the beats, for never returning to a more straightforward narrative after Junky and Queer - I am convinced that, informed by all his stylistic explorations, it would have really been something.

I did like this book, although I may have devoured it more thoroughly had I read it in my early 20s. I'd just like to add that the chapter devoted to Chancelade's dreams is pure gold throughout. Try reading it aloud, with drums in the background if you can, or just the sound of your own heartbeat ringing in your ears.
SusanSazzios is offline



Reply to Thread New Thread

« Previous Thread | Next Thread »

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 

All times are GMT +1. The time now is 03:11 PM.
Copyright ©2000 - 2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.6.0 PL2
Design & Developed by Amodity.com
Copyright© Amodity