The 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature
was awarded to French writer J.-M.G.
Le Clézio, one of the preeminent literary
figures of his generation. He was
known for his intricate, seductive fiction
and distinctive works of nonfiction
that mediated between the past and the
present, juxtaposing the modern world
with a primordial landscape of ambiguity
and mystery. Le Clézio—the 14th
French-language writer to be honoured
as the laureate in literature and the first
since Claude Simon received the prize
in 1985—was cited by the Swedish
Academy as an “author of new departures,
poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy,
explorer of a humanity beyond
and below the reigning civilization.” Le
Clézio acknowledged an expansive
range of literary influences, including
Homer, Milton, Boccaccio, Rabelais,
Juan Rulfo, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and James Joyce, and was prolific in a
variety of genres, often merging narrative
forms and techniques. Accomplished
as a novelist, children’s author,
and essayist, Le Clézio forged a literature
of universal themes, from life and
death, rebirth, and redemption to immigration
and displacement, alienation,
and the loss of innocence.
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was
born on April 13, 1940, in Nice, France;
he was descended from a Breton family
that had immigrated to the formerly
French and subsequently British colony
of Mauritius. Bilingual in French and
English, he spent part of his childhood
in Nigeria before completing his secondary
education in France. After studying
for a time in England, he returned
to France, where he earned an undergraduate
degree (1963) from the Institut
d’Études Littéraires (now the University
of Nice) and a master’s degree (1964)
from the University of Aix-en-Provence.
In 1983 he completed a doctorate of letters
at the University of Perpignan,
France. Le Clézio traveled extensively
and immersed himself in the study of
other cultures, particularly the indigenous
peoples of Mexico and Central
America, which he wrote about in Trois
villes saintes (1980), Le Rêve mexicain ou
la pensée interrompue (1988; The Mexican
Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought
of Amerindian Civilizations, 1993), and
La Fête chantée (1997).
Although he emerged within the
French literary milieu dominated by
writers of the nouveau roman (new
novel) such as Simon, Alain Robbe-
Grillet, and Marguerite Duras, Le Clézio
developed independently from his contemporaries
and established himself
early in his career as an author of singular
achievement and temperament.
He made his debut as a novelist with the
publication in 1963 of Le Procès-verbal
(The Interrogation, 1964) and gained
widespread acclaim as a young author
when the book—which had been sent as
an unsolicited manuscript to the prestigious
Gallimard publishing house—was
awarded the Prix Renaudot. Other publications
that further enhanced Le
Clézio’s reputation in France and abroad
included the short-story collection La
Fièvre (1965; Fever, 1966) and the novels
Le Déluge (1966; The Flood, 1967), Terra
65
Nobel Prizes
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Olivier Laban-Mattei—AFP/Getty Images
amata (1967; Terra Amata, 1969), La
Guerre (1970; War, 1973), and Les Géants
(1973; The Giants, 1975). Le Clézio was
drawn to the marginalized of society
and offered a compassionate and evocative
portrayal of the disenfranchised and
displaced in search of meaning, identity,
and reintegration. For example, Lalla,
the protagonist of his acclaimed novel
Désert (1980), is a North African Berber
separated from her past and her cultural
inheritance when she was forced to flee
her desert homeland; she returns pregnant
and resolved both to perpetuate her
tribal inheritance and to embrace her
legacy of memory and transcendence.
Beginning with the publication in
1991 of Onitsha (Onitsha, 1997), Le
Clézio turned increasingly to semiautobiographical
works such as the novels
La Quarantaine (1995) and Révolutions
(2003). In L’Africain (2004), Le Clézio
recounted the childhood experience of
being reunited with his father in the aftermath
of World War II. Later works
include Ballaciner (2007), a personal
tribute to the art of filmmaking and its
relationship to literature, and the novel
Ritournelle de la faim (2008). As a
writer Le Clézio was primarily a storyteller
and craftsman for whom the act
of writing was one of the “greatest
pleasures in life.” He said, “I feel that
the writer is just a kind of witness of
what is happening. A writer is not a
prophet, is not a philosopher, he’s just
someone who is witness to what is
around him.”