Searching for Nobel Gold in The Prospector
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I’d never heard of him. Have you? Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone with the unlikely name of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is the Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, top dog in the literary world of 2008, and nobody I know had ever heard that name before or read a single sentence by him.
When the University Book Store was lucky enough to get in a small shipment of his most recent novel, The Prospector, still in hardback, I snatched one. I’ve been reading it ever since. I’m approaching the halfway point, and I’m frankly baffled.
The Prospector has all the elements of a novel by Joseph Conrad – tropical sun, remote islands, the sea, colonials and natives – but it’s as though the story has been written by Proust, so it’s all memory images and living out childhood dreams and moving in slow motion. There are very few characters – Alexis, the young narrator, and his sister, Laure, their mother, and now Captain Bradmer. So it’s not about character interaction, that’s for sure. Le Clezio doesn’t seem very interested in people.
Not only that, but there have been no plot twists or surprises.
You see why I’m a little confused. Though written in first person, our narrator Alexis L’Etang hardly takes you into his confidence. He’d much rather tell you about the rocks and beaches. What is this novel trying to do, then, with all this slow, dense writing? I’d have to call it an evocation, with elaborate, almost ecstatic descriptions coming at the reader in rivers of detail, the words all conjured up by memory. The initial sequence, upon which the whole book will repeatedly reflect, is the young narrator growing up on the island of Mauritius, before the summer of the cyclone. The cyclone sequence itself, which comes at the conclusion of the childhood opening, is unforgettable, truly a Steven Spielberg moment – water forcing its way under the doors, creeping across a living room carpet, a frantic mother clutching her two children as their house is gouged, smashed, shattered, and ripped apart all around them.
Alexis is at sea now, on board the Zeta heading for the island of Agalega, and I’m definitely ready for some plot twist or character surprise. We’ve been at sea a long time. For what? A lot of sea description. Hardly a flicker of interest in the other men on board. Another ten pages, and I’m frustrated. I’m trapped in the mind of a young man who is oblivious to other people. I’m not as fascinated by the sea as Alexis is. I suspect, if Le Clezio hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, I might consider bailing here. But I’m going to stick it out a bit longer…
As it turns out, a hundred pages longer. Though the story moves forward at glacial speed, the language builds a kind of trance. Midway through my Saturday I look up and realize it’s getting dark outside and I’ve been at it all day, hunkered down in my armchair, with or without my cat, sailing for the island of Rodrigues and meeting the fascinating Maraf girl with her harpoon, Ouma. The whole thing has an utterly classic feel, gorgeous language, thoughtful sentences, an industrious hero straight out of Robinson Crusoe in a plot veering more toward Green Mansions.
Alexis has searched for his father’s treasure, he’s fallen in love with an island girl, and now he’s enlisted and survived the horrors of the First World War. How all this hangs together is beyond me, but unless I get a really tempting phone call I’m going to be anchored to my armchair tonight until I reach the end of this voyage. Which is only another sixty pages…
I didn’t finish until this morning. I was tired and didn’t want to rush the ending. Now I’m done with the novel, and I’m no clearer about the experience. I don’t feel rewarded, I don’t have that exhilaration that comes from a book that’s enriched me. Spending over three hundred pages in the mind of a man who finds rocks, trees and sea birds far more interesting than human beings has been a bit of a burden. Alexis is so off in his own world there’s not really much to like about him. He’s constantly walking off without explanation and leaving his beloved behind – like volunteering to fight in the world war without telling her. Ouma, regrettably, is little more than a male fantasy without one original characteristic or trait. Okay, she uses a harpoon. These characters don’t have depth. Treacherous cousin Ferdinand barely steps on stage. There’s no writer’s joy in bringing these characters to life. Their actions are often reported bluntly, from afar.
That said, let’s try to figure out why Le Clezio could have been singled out for the Nobel Prize. What does he have more of than anyone else? The novel is definitely anti-colonial. There’s a nightmarish revolt at a sugar refinery early in the novel where an oppressive overseer is thrown alive into the oven. In the background of the story we hear about revolts. And there’s one key scene where Alexis goes to work in the field beside the men he’s supposed to be watching over, and loses his job because of it.
I had hoped to use the Nobel Prize-winner’s The Prospector, coming out in paperback later this month, as my December selection for the book club. I’ve got six pages of notes on it. Unfortunately, judging by the way I feel now after having spent the weekend reading it, the search for my December book still goes on.
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm
yes i had heard him and he is good
i do not agree with the view that some modern greek writers expressed for him that he is not so taqlented and he is a second class writer
these are greek nonsenses from people that believe that they are better writers than le clezio and no one knows them in europe or america
wwww.arelis.gr
it contains the forbidden in greece erotonomicon
due to its sexual theme and literature innovations and the poems new york olympia and exhibition of orthodromic retrospection