Onitsha. By J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Translated by Alison Anderson. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. 208. $35 (hb); $15 (pb).

La Fête chantée. By J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Pp. 256. 120fr.

Poisson d'or. By J.-M. G. Le Clézio. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Pp. 256. 120fr.

A prolific, best-selling, and prize-winning French novelist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (born 1940) both challenges and moves the reader by raising key questions about our fragile, violent, ecologically-threatened, interdependent, multicultural world. Probably his engaging openness to non-Western—especially African and native American—cultures derives from his own extraordinary familial background, which not only specifically inspires several novels but also forms the deep personal enigmas that he seeks, by writing, to resolve. He was born of a French mother and a British father who was actually of Breton stock. Long before his lifetime, during the French Revolution, a Breton ancestor who had refused to cut his long hair (as was required by the revolutionary army) fled France in an attempt to arrive in India. The deserter made it only so far as the island of Mauritius. When Mauritius was colonized by the English shortly thereafter, during Napoleon's time, Le Clézio's ancestor pledged loyalty to the British crown. The writer's mother and father were actually cousins who had descended from this same 18th-century Mauritian family, yet the former was Francophone whereas the latter was English-speaking. When Le Clézio was born in Nice, France, his father was laboring as a military physician in the bush country of Nigeria. The Second World War kept the family separated, and the boy—who learned English so that he could communicate with his father—made the ocean voyage to Africa only at the age of eight (at which point, as it turned out, his father spoke French well, and the natives communicated only in pidgin English). This intimidating encounter, and the year and a half that Le Clézio thereafter spent in Nigeria, are fictionalized with great force in Onitsha (1991), tellingly written over forty years after the events in question. In several of Le Clézio's novels, in fact, a search for an absent parent motivates the plot. This gifted storyteller characteristically focuses on the possibilities of filling in the many gaping absences—ranging from the emotional to the ontological—upon which our existences, especially in Western countries, are founded.

Recalling the disquieting ambience of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Onitsha first probes the uneasy relationships between a father and a son, and a husband and a wife, who barely know each other. Fintan, the fictional hero modeled on the author, is accompanied by his Italian mother Maria Luisa, nicknamed "Maou." After imagining his father with hostility ("The man would speak English, he would have two vertical wrinkles between his eyebrows, the way men do, and Maou would no longer be his mother") while he is still aboard the boat and spending his time locked in his cabin, the boy is chilled by their first encounter, on the harbor quay. The father, Geoffrey Allen, shakes Fintan's hand perfunctorily and tersely asks: "Are you all right, boy?" Then they get into the Ford and roll away toward Onitsha.

In time, however, Fintan adjusts to his new life, comes to appreciate his father, and especially—through his friendship with a local fisherman's son, Bony—enters into a sort of initiation rite in reverse. Whereas the classical Bildungsroman often illustrates how the hero is educated, rises in society and acquires artistic or intellectual skills, here Fintan, raised as a Westerner, must learn how to re-establish a direct, fearless, respectful relationship with Nature. Running barefoot, without fear, through the snake- and scorpion-infested grass is the salient symbol of this accomplishment, even as, in La Quarantaine (1995), the hero finally wades through the shallow water of the bay without cutting his feet on the coral reef. These feats imply no dauntlessness or carefreeness, however; on the contrary, the self-liberating process defined by Le Clézio involves opening up the senses to full capacity and becoming acutely conscious of every detail in one's surroundings. As Fintan acquires this capability, his father, in contrast, becomes increasingly absorbed in his pipe-dream of one day discovering where the "Queen of Meroë" had founded her city. In Le Chercheur d'or (1985; English translation: The Prospector, 1993), Le Clézio similarly depicts his Mauritian magistrate-grandfather's secret passion of searching for gold on Rodrigues Island. (Voyage à Rodrigues [1986], a journal kept by Le Clézio while he was trying to locate traces of his grandfather on this island, provides an excellent introduction to his sensibility.) The novelist often juxtaposes illusory daydreaming with the reality-grounded mysticism of non-Western societies. Like the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, about whom Le Clézio wrote a long paper for his Diplôme d'Études Supérieures in 1964 and who became a cherished mentor, the author also experimented, while in Panama, with psychotropic Indian drugs and was fascinated by the mythic otherworld to which he gained access.

Onitsha also includes a scathing critique of colonialism, through the voice of Maou, who increasingly speaks out against the ways the white masters treat the locals. Her views marginalize the family with respect to the other Europeans, and the father's business affairs collapse. At the end, the boy abruptly finds himself reading Horace in a public school in Bath, England, and suffering culture shock once again. As an adult, Fintan returns to Africa in an attempt to revisit the places he had once known and loved. But Le Clézio shows that no durable consolation for such a loss, for such an absence, can be founded on mere memories. Attachment to the past, in any nostalgic sense, can only conclude in a dead end. Le Clézio's writing always moves back toward the richness and the responsibilities of the present, highlighting the necessity of undergoing a veritable apprenticeship enabling one to experience the present fully.

His fiction, whose scenes and details thus usually stand at only a slight remove from the facts of his own life, is thereby warmly personal in tone and thoroughly credible in effect. An incessant traveler, he is driven by a desire to understand how different cultures, lifestyles, mentalities, and values interact. Such an attitude underlies his deep-rooted commitment to examining the implicit negative values of our tumultuous modern world, so often torn apart by cross-cultural strife. Yet traveling, and settling in various foreign localities, teaches. As the years of his own young adulthood went by, Le Clézio indeed came to live in Bath (he also studied English at the University of Bristol), in Thailand (where he fulfilled his French military draft obligations; yet the young, already well-known author was eventually deported for having denounced child-prostitution rings in the pages of Le Figaro), in Mexico, in Panama, and in the United States. During the past two decades, Le Clézio has divided his time between Paris, Nice, Mexico (especially in Jaconoa, at the foot of the Paricutin volcano), and Albuquerque (where he began teaching at the University of New Mexico in 1977). This is not to forget Le Clézio's Moroccan wife, Jemia, an additional influence on his literary predilections. The novelist has explored Arabic culture in his novel Le Désert (1980), as well as in an album of photos and texts co-authored with Jemia, Gens des nuages (1997), which evokes the Saguia el Hamra valley in south Morocco where her own familial roots lie. Étoile errante (1992), initially set in Nice during the Second World War, similarly depicts the parallel lives of two women: Nejma, a Palestinian, and Esther, a Jewish emigrant to the newly-founded nation of Israel. Their lives cross only once, when the two women exchange names. Never, however, will one woman forget the other. Le Clézio subtly gets beyond blunt ideological considerations and puts his finger on the human suffering on both sides.

By his own admission, his long sojourns (between 1970-4) with two Indian tribes (the Emberas and the Waunanas) dwelling in a remote region of Panama were life-changing. In La Fête chantée, a collection of sixteen erudite essays attempting to reconstruct Indian thought patterns just before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, he notes in his preface that living with these tribes changed "my ideas about the world and about art, my way of being with other people, my way of walking, of eating, of loving, of sleeping, even my dreams." La Fête chantée is thus composed in a spirit of homage and gratitude. Like Fintan in Onitsha, Le Clézio learned that "one must walk silently in the forest, without stopping, without sitting down, with every sense keenly awake . . . I learned to recognize trees, those that were useful for hollowing out into pirogues, those that never rotted, like the bitter cedar and the cocobollo, those that burned slowly on the stones of the hearth. I learned to strip the bark off a rubber tree and to beat it in water so as to turn it into the softest of sleeping mats. I learned to distinguish the strong smells of the forest and to stalk an agouti as surely as if I were watching it."

His Indian friends helped him become "less intellectual," as he has often stated, in his manner of apprehending the world. From the stylistic point of view, a much more sensual, descriptive, approach to the physical world is indeed evident in such mature novels as Le Chercheur d'or or La Quarantaine, the latter a tale based on a true event in his other grandfather's life. Along with several Europeans, this physician-grandfather had been put into quarantine for a while, off Mauritius. Several passages of the novel evoke the Europeans' fearful and conflictual relationship with nature, as opposed to the ease with which the local natives adapt themselves to scarcity, even to the point of accepting death with calmness. (In La Fête chantée and elsewhere, Le Clézio admires the way Indians accompany friends or family members into death.) The novelist does not intend to render the natural world from the outside, from the other side of the ontological barrier, as it were; a human being, he suggests, can perhaps momentarily merge with Being through increasingly precise, respectful, vigilant perceptions. Such is the lesson taught to him by Indians.

Several of the essays in La Fête chantée analyze, through extremely close readings of sixteenth-century texts, how ancient Indian prophecies actually assisted the Spanish in their conquest of Mexico. In particular, Le Clézio studies The Chronicles of Michoac-An (which he himself has translated into French as La Relation de Michoacán, 1984), a 1540 Spanish text delineating the myths, legends, religious beliefs and culture of the Purepecha Indians. Le Clézio ranks this text with The Iliad and La Chanson de Roland. Although the Purepechas had built up one of the most powerful and harmonious Central American civilizations, "entirely devoted to the supernatural forces that had given it birth," as Le Clézio phrases it, these Indians grew paralyzed with fear at the arrival of the Spanish. The author speculates that the conquistadors, who were not really numerous or militarily powerful, would not have overthrown the Purepechas had not an ancient prophecy—concerning the tribe's destruction by a foreign people who would invade them on strange "deer-like" animals—seemingly been fulfilled when the Spaniards came ashore with their horses. "This bellicose people," adds Le Clézio, referring to the Purepechas, "did not even dream of fighting back." The hypothesis is fascinating, and Le Clézio shows graphically how the Purepechas' intimate relationship with their gods interpenetrated the minutest details of their everyday life. When the two cultures collided, these religious beliefs proved to be fatal.

Le Clézio's engagement with foreignness, otherness, and non-Western mentalities has not made him inattentive to current social realities in his native France (itself an increasingly uneasy blend of nationalities and cultures), as is clear from his compelling recent novel, Poisson d'or. As in a picaresque tale, Laïla ("Night"), the half-deaf Moroccan narrator, is unaware of her origins. She knows only that she was "stolen," put into a sack and taken away from her mother. At first brought up by the elderly Spanish Jewess who bought her, she must later fend for herself in miserable urban environments. She embodies Le Clézio's seminal themes: the relentless search for absent parents (here, a mother) and for one's true "name"; the coming-of-age of a child from a "primitive" culture who is thrown into a brutal Western society; and above all, the necessity of finding—then living by—genuine values, in a world that despises genuineness and whose unique values are the pursuit of money and the accumulation of material things.

As in Onitsha, this spellbinding novel chronicles Laïla's lifetime as a series of initiation rites. Coincidences and a few sudden decisions take her from North Africa to Paris, Nice, Boston, Chicago, and from there to California. On her way, she encounters much human treachery and often must live in extreme poverty, depicted by Le Clézio with gripping, passionate realism. But there are positive, redeeming moments in the book, usually involving spontaneous kindnesses that demand nothing in return. A beautiful scene occurs when El Hadj, an old man, bequeaths a passport to Laïla, enabling her to continue her travels. Anyone living in France will recognize the allusion to the recent problem of "paperless" individuals (les sans-papiers), on behalf of whom numerous artists, writers, and intellectuals have demanded a satisfactory administrative solution.

Toward the end of the novel, in an American shopping mall, Laïla goes from one store to another, trying on clothes—both women's and men's. "It's my way of being someone else," she remarks. "That is, myself. . . . What I am looking for is my reflection in the mirrors. It frightens me, and it attracts me. It's me, and not me." Helped by chance and spurred on by her own pluckiness, she finally pins down her identity and even locates her mother—quite unexpectedly, back in Morocco. Despite all the nastiness and hardship that is unsentimentally, even sometimes angrily, exhibited in this moving tale, Le Clézio chooses to emphasize at the end—as in most of his writings—that ever setting forth on one's deepest personal quest is what counts in life. Such quests are not impossible to accomplish, even in the wastelands of the contemporary world, and one must continue to hope.