Le Clezio who? No clue. The English world - recently chastised for its insularity - may scratch its collective head over the latest winner of the Nobel Prize. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is not, I would have thought, a household name in Britain, or America. That may be part of the point - though I lived in Paris for several years, and did not encounter his name there, either. Following him on Amazon, one can quickly see, despite a few translations, his work is mostly out of print, out of bounds, off-limit, for most Anglo-saxon readers. "J. M. G. le Clézio" resists being absorbed into the celebrity world of publishing, prizes, and parties, that typifies a kind of Americanized hegemony of the bookworld (or so it might seem to some jury members). However, despite the undoubted talents of this thrillingly obscure (to me) Francophone writer, I wonder how long Margaret Atwood will have to wait, to be recognised as one of the major post-colonial literary figures of the past 40 years?
Le Clezio who? No clue. The English world - recently chastised for its insularity - may scratch its collective head over the latest winner of the Nobel Prize. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is not, I would have thought, a household name in Britain, or America. That may be part of the point - though I lived in Paris for several years, and did not encounter his name there, either. Following him on Amazon, one can quickly see, despite a few translations, his work is mostly out of print, out of bounds, off-limit, for most Anglo-saxon readers. "J. M. G. le Clézio" resists being absorbed into the celebrity world of publishing, prizes, and parties, that typifies a kind of Americanized hegemony of the bookworld (or so it might seem to some jury members). However, despite the undoubted talents of this thrillingly obscure (to me) Francophone writer, I wonder how long Margaret Atwood will have to wait, to be recognised as one of the major post-colonial literary figures of the past 40 years?
Comments
But I admit I have not read him myself!
I think it is symptomatic of the insularity of English-language publishing in general that such a figure (considered by a plurality of Lire readers in the early nineties to be the greatest French novelist of the age, according to Wikipedia) has hardly been translated at all.
www.arelis.gr it contains the forbidden in greece erotonomicon that socked the greek public opinion with its sexuality and sensuality and the anticapitalistic context