Grove Koger

April 13 is the birthday of French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, who was born in 1940. Although he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, I seldom see references to him and have never run into anyone who recognizes his name. For all intents and purposes, then, he’s unknown, and that’s a fitting situation for someone who’s written about places that, for most of us, are also unknown.

In his 1985 novel The Prospector (Le Chercheur d’or), Le Clézio is actually writing something close to a family history, one set on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, which was a French possession (Île de France) from 1715 to 1810. Although the writer’s ancestors were Bretons and he himself was born in Nice, his father was born in Mauritius, and Le Clézio himself has said that he “grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France.” Not surprisingly, he holds dual French and Mauritian citizenship.

The prospector of the novel’s title, Alexis L’Etang, devotes his adult life to a search for a lost treasure on the island of Rodrigues, which lies nearly 400 miles from Mauritius. The treasure may or not be real, but for Alexis, it becomes a symbol of his own idyllic childhood with his sister and his father’s dreams of recouping the family fortune—both destroyed by the terrible cyclone of April 1892. And while The Prospector embodies some of the themes of European colonialism, it harks back to an ancient body of myths. After wasting bleak years as an office clerk in Mauritius and as an infantryman in France during World War I, Alexis ships aboard the trading schooner Zeta, bound for Rodrigues. At its wheel, he feels the “powerful surge of water under the helm and hull,” the “vibrations of the waves as they hit the prow and the gusts of wind in the sails.” He’s “surrounded only by the future,” a future of “sea, wind, sky, and light.”

While reading The Prospector, I was reminded repeatedly of Frederic Prokosch’s poem “Sunburned Ulysses,” in which Prokosch describes the wanderer as “loving the unattainable and forbidden, in love with change alone.”

The Nobel Prize committee praised Le Clézio as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy.” As he himself has put it, “Writing for me is like travelling. It’s getting out of myself and living another life, maybe a better life.”

The dust jacket at the top of today’s post is from the 1993 Verba Mundi / Godine edition, translated by Carol Marks. (A little surprisingly, a second English translation, by C. Dickson, has been published by Atlantic.) The portrait of Le Clézio is by U. Montan and is reproduced courtesy of the Nobel Foundation, while the colorful antique map of Mauritius is by A.H. Dufour. The photograph of the Mauritian landscape was taken by happyflycz (pixabay.com) and is reproduced courtesy of Needpix.com.

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