Desert - Hardcover

Le Clezio, Jean-Marie Gustave

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567923860 ISBN 13: 9781567923865

Publisher: David R Godine Pub, 2009

Synopsis

Available for the first time in English translation, Desert is a novel composed of two alternating narratives, set in counterpoint. The first takes place in the desert between 1909 and 1912 and evokes the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the "Blue Men," notorious warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour's tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour's tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last.The second narrative relates the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the "Blue Men." Though she is an orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, the blood of her proud, obstinate tribe runs in her veins. All too soon, Lalla must flee to escape a forced marriage with an older, wealthy man. She travels to France, undergoing many trials there, from working in a brothel to success as a highly paid fashion model, but she never betrays the blood of her ancestors.

About this title

Review

'A rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years.' --New York Times

'Dense, highly measured, intensely imagistic... A book one must admire for its profound seriousness, for its scorched-earth poetics and for its rendering of a lost world.' --Douglas Kennedy, The Times

'[Le Clezio's] tales have epic and exotic qualities...he writes with a moral seriousness and engagement... These stories of displacement and exile are both timely and epic... This is one of Le Clezio's major works... It reveals the history of colonial France in the Arab world.'
--Andrew Hussey, Financial Times

From the Publisher

The international bestseller, by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2008, available for the first time in English translation.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R Godine Pub
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1567923860
• ISBN 13: 9781567923865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352