By ELIZABETH HAWES in the NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/review/Hawes-t.html

Before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, J. M. G. Le Clézio had only the faintest of presences in America. Readers may or may not have remembered him as the handsome young Franco-Mauritian who in the early days of le nouveau romanhad won the Prix Renaudot for his first novel, an aimless, intriguing experiment called “The Interrogation” (“Le Procès-Verbal”). By the late 1970s, Le Clézio, who has known many countries, had turned to his habit of travel for inspiration and was exploring distant landscapes and primitive cultures in books like “Desert” (“Désert”), which won another prestigious prize in France. “Desert,” however, was never published in English. Before the Nobel, Le Clézio’s early experimental novels had fallen out of print, and his latest works, drawn from his childhood and his concerns about the environment, had received passing notice. Le Clézio himself is said to be reclusive and keeps a low profile. His sudden eminence is understandably something of a wonder.

The American publication of “Desert” is therefore an event, bringing into closer range one of the leading writers in France. “Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille. His central characters are the stalwart young boy Nour, who in 1909 is migrating north across the Western Sahara in a caravan of nomadic Berber tribes, and a dreamy, copper-skinned young orphan named Lalla, descended from the blue men, whose parentage helps her survive immigrant life in the 1970s. There are secondary characters, historical figures like the legendary sheik Ma al-Ainine, revered by his people and demonized as a fanatic by the French, and such fablelike creations as Lalla’s two kindred spirits (the Hartani, a mute shepherd who can communicate with animals, and Naman, the old fisherman who tells her wise stories) or the pretty Gypsy boy Radicz, who is being trained as a thief on the streets of Marseille. In an important way, however, the presiding force of “Desert” is the land itself. As the omission of the definite article in the title seems to suggest, the desert, the jagged rocks and blistering heat, the maze of dunes, the waves of open space, “timeless,” “deep in their bodies,” is not only a setting, but also a kingdom, a resource and a state of mind.

“Desert” moves slowly, its pace set in the beginning by the tortuous trek across the Sahara and by Le Clézio’s way with language — the minutely detailed descriptions of the suffering, the recurring images of the sky, birds, the wind and light, the long waves of insistent prose designed to saturate and surround, like music. Repetitions are deliberate, rhythmic, metaphors are meant to enlighten and reflect. “Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.” Le Clézio is writing about people who are close to the earth and sea, whose stories come from there, and at the same time about the vast epic of nature and its sustaining force. The connection between the land and all its creatures, humans, plants, animals, insects, has been a passionate theme in Le Clézio’s later work, and it is the lesson of Nour and more directly Lalla, who, to escape the harsh realities of her life, inhabits the mystical world of her ancestors, fed by visions of whirling winds and glistening sand and her communion with al-Ser, the spirit of the blue man warrior, “a dream that has come from afar.” He has the light of the desert in his eyes, as Lalla does too, which helps account for her success as the international fashion model Hawa — a career she abandons to return to her old neighborhood in Tangier and givebirth.

Le Clézio is an unusual storyteller, often called difficult or unclassifiable, which he says is only appropriate to a novelist and the brew of ideas called the novel. His work, more than 40 books of both fiction and nonfiction, has been shaped by his mixed roots and his own wanderings — born in France of a family who had lived for generations on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, he grew up thinking that there was a somewhere else that embodied his homeland — and he writes from experience, bearing witness but, as he says, without giving a message in the manner that Camus and Sartre did. Camus, a Nobel laureate a half-century ago, who grew up in French Algeria, comes to mind in reading “Desert,” for his own lyric descriptions of the desert and sea and the invisibility of the poor, and for his own feelings about colonialism and the indigenous culture of Algeria. Camus, like Le Clézio, wrote directly about experience and also about what Le Clézio calls the contradiction of experience, referring in particular to Camus’s dilemma during the Algerian war when he was unable to choose between the independence and his love of his native land. The tragedy of the Algerian war, like his memories of African chain gangs building a swimming pool in Nigeria or, later, his four years living with the Emberas Indians in the forests of Panama, lie behind Le Clézio’s compassionate attitude toward the third world and his empathy for the blue men and other native cultures. He is the sum of images from every where, he has said in interviews. “My books are what resemble me most.”

There is an element of the missionary in Le Clézio, just as there is still something of the rebel in him, in search of the new novel, trying to break loose from the traditional bonds of fiction and language to mirror a wider world — as the Nobel citation described, to explore “a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” Beneath his pantheism and ethnology, there is also a serious critic of contemporary Western civilization and its rationalism, pointing out the conflict between nature and cities, the disconnect between man and mythology. In “Desert,” a powerful anger erupts in his portrayal of the underbelly of Marseille and the lost people that poverty has brought to France, people who “don’t exist because they leave no trace of their passage.” Le Clézio, who has dual passports from France and Mauritius and now spends part of the year in New Mexico, thinks of himself as an exile too, who finds his home in the French language.

http://www.rue89.com/cabinet-de-lecture/cormac-mccarthy-en-route-vers-lapocalypse

Quelques mois après » Un homme » , de Philip Roth -autre géant vivant des lettres yankee-, Cormac McCarthy propose lui aussi une réflexion sur la mort. Et, un an après avoir revisité le western ( » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » ), revisite le roman apocalyptique. Roman le plus étrange de son auteur, » La Route » obtint le Pulitzer 2007. Et est le premier coup de coeur du Cabinet de lecture en cette rentrée 2008.

Depuis la disparition de Norman Mailer, Philip Roth et Cormac McCarthy sont -avec Thomas Pynchon- les derniers géants de leur génération. Deux écrivains reclus, introuvables, quasi impossibles à interviewer. Aussi, en juin, quand le dernier accepta l’invitation télévisée d’Oprah Winfrey, ce fut le tonnerre. C’est que le roman venait de recevoir le Prix Pulitzer 2007. Quelques semaines auparavant, les frères Coen avaient projeté à Cannes l’adaptation de » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » .

Ainsi, après une décennie de silence, l’auteur du capital » Méridien de sang » (1985) refaisait donc bel et bien surface. Et montrait à quel point ses fictions étaient utiles.

Le monde d’hier, le monde de demain : un roman de transition

» La Route » est un vrai roman de transition. Idéal pour passer d’un monde à l’autre. Les ombres y sont aussi vivantes que les hommes, et on ne sait pas où on est.

Nous voici dans un pays où les cendres fument encore, un pays que vient de traverser une tragédie (laquelle ? nous ne saurons jamais). Ne subsistent que des routes, des ruines, des palissades, des restes d’incendies.

Un homme et son petit garçon semblent être seuls survivants de la tragédie. En pleine apocalypse, ils marchent, avancent vers les côtes du Sud. Ils poussent un caddie orné d’un rétroviseur chromé, où est stocké le strict nécessaire. Ils croisent nombres de cadavres, de ruines, de carcasses. Tel un prédateur, le père quête les conserves pourries et les ramène comme nourriture à son fils. Le parcours est lent, très lent, dans la peur, la pluie, le vent, la neige, la nuit.

L’un comme l’autre vivent surtout la peur au ventre. Peur de la mort, certes, mais aussi peur d’eux-mêmes : quand l’adulte voit son reflet dans la glace, son premier réflexe est de pointer le revolver. Les dialogues sont rares. Ils matérialisent trop la peur. Et pour survivre ici, il faut marcher. Ils croiseront quelques » survivants » , êtres non-définis d’un monde en recomposition.

C’est que le couple est pisté. Sont-ils les derniers hommes du monde connu ? L’existence même de l’enfant devient une énigme : il est le futur incarné… Mais il reste quelques autres hommes qui ont survécu. Rares. Peut-être notre duo est-il, seulement, le dernier spécimen de » gentils » , de » ceux qui portent le feu » . Aussi doivent-ils échapper aux pillards.

Roman réaliste et new age

Dans » Le Méridien de sang » , dans » Non, ce pays n’est pas pour le vieil homme » -deux westerns-, comme dans ce dernier livre, McCarthy revisite des genres littéraires. Dans ces derniers -polar, western, SF-, il est souvent question de la fin d’un homme, de la fin d’un monde. D’une civilisation. Le genre a ceci de particulier qu’il angle, qu’il métaphorise. Qu’il offre la matière et l’anti-matière.

« La Route » est comme une métaphore plurielle. Globale. A l’heure où, allongement de la durée de vie et clonage faisant, l’homme a un rapport de moins en moins rationnel à sa vie et à sa mort, le livre de McCarthy agit comme le roman d’une autre rationalité. D’un monde où l’homme n’est plus seul, mais où il n’a pas conscience de ce qui l’accompagne. Il n’a plus conscience que de sa survie.

Ici, le père » ne savait qu’une chose, que l’enfant était son garant. Il dit : « S’il n’est pas la parole de Dieu, Dieu n’a jamais parlé’ » . Ici, les survivants sont » assis au bord de la route comme des aéronautes en détresse » .

McCarthy, dans son style toujours très resserré, allie roman réaliste et récit new age. Un livre narratif et puissamment philosophique. Qui unit le défini et l’indéfini : ici, peu de faits, peu d’histoire, seulement le souffle pur de ce qui fait survivre.

De McCarthy à Spielberg en passant par les Pink Floyd

Cela donne un livre où les deux garçons semblent fuir leur propre mort comme leur propre vie. Où tout ce qu’ils croisent (objet comme signe comme homme) semble symboliser la mort. En lisant » La Route » on pense beaucoup à  » Duel » , le premier téléfilm de Spielberg (1975), à cette course à la mort entre la voiture et le titanesque camion.

En lisant » La Route » , on se dit que » Wish you were here » , l’album de Pink Floyd sortit la même année que » Duel » -l’album de » Welcome to the Machine » et de » Shine on you Crazy Diamond » , l’hommage à Syd Barrett- a trouvé son histoire.

» La Route » se lira avec » Un homme » de Roth, paru en France à l’automne. Deux auteurs qui n’avaient jamais si profondément évoqué la mort. Roth est un urbain, et » Un homme » est un livre psychologique. McCarthy est un nomade, et ses romans sont des romans d’espaces.

Le souffle et la perspective qu’on trouve dans la dernière partie de » La Route » est titanesque. C’est le roman le plus dépouillé de McCarthy, un vrai roman car il est un espace-temps.

Usually, I speak about American Literature well-translated in English. Today, I would like to change the rules and to speak about my favorite book:  The Little Horses of Tarquinia which was written by Marguerite Duras in 1953.

Marguerite Duras is a French author. She wrote a lot of great novels, plays, films, interviews and short narratives. Her best-seller L’amant/The Lover won the Goncourt prize in 1984. But this text was not her favorite. To discover Duras, it’s important, according to me to read Moderato Cantabile, India Song or Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia.

But go back on the blog’s topic: I would like to know what do you think about the translation. You can discover some pages on this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=K2dEKABKkDsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=duras+tarquinia&ei=07_OSqyQD6eKlQTI_PDWBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Read a little bit and let me know what you think about it!

]]> http://marlenedx.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/les-petits-chevaux-de-tarquinia-the-littles-horses-of-tarquinia-by-marguerite-duras/feed/ 0 marlenedx Tarquinia by Duras http://marlenedx.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/falling-man-lhomme-qui-tombe-by-don-delillo/ http://marlenedx.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/falling-man-lhomme-qui-tombe-by-don-delillo/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:27:34 +0000 marlenedx http://marlenedx.wordpress.com/?p=258 ]]> Translated in French by Marianne Véron

Don DeLillo is an American author whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

There are great books, good books, interesting books, boring books… For me, this one is not a great one, but it’s a not a bad one either. It’s just a book I don’t like. Usually, I like Don DeLillo. I read The Names and Underworld with a lot a pleasure. But reading Falling Man took me forever! Perhaps, it’s because of the topic – I don’t remember how many books I have read on 9/11- , perhaps, it’s because of the characters - I wasn’t interested by them -…  After reading this book, I read some French critics on it. Everything that I’ve read seems pretty good. So even if, according to me, Falling Man is not the best book on 9/11, it seems to be very emotional and pretty strong for lots of people.

A nub of 47 square miles, much of it punctuated by vertigo-inducing hills, most of it surrounded by ocean water – half of it the open, not-so-tranquil Pacific, the other half the calm, protected currents of a gray-blue bay.

Just as San Francisco has been shaped by its dramatic earthquake-scarred, coastal setting, the city, despite its relative youth, has also been defined by legions of writers whose words have brought it to life. Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Adams, Amy Tan, Michelle Tea – they have all etched the landscape for us.

And so we thought it would be fun to create a map of San Francisco composed of some of the very words – from novels, poems and essays – that animate our city.

Ian Huebert’s beautiful, whimsical literary map – loosely inspired by one of St. Petersburg, Russia, by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter – fittingly evokes the colorful, free-form and text-rich rock concert posters from a music scene that put San Francisco on the map in the 1960s.

Of course, the map isn’t intended as a comprehensive collection of quotes about the city (apologies to Herbert Gold, Bret Harte, Khaled Hosseini, Fae Myenne Ng, Tom Wolfe and on and on).

If you’d like to read more quotes, a few books make for excellent resources: “City by the Bay: San Francisco in Art and Literature” (edited by Alexandra Chappell; SFMOMA; 2002), “San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City” (edited by John Miller; Chronicle Books; 1990) and “The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs” (Don Herron; City Lights Books; 1985). Also, a San Francisco literary map illustrated by Paul Madonna (826 Valencia; 2005) is a useful guide to landmarks, resources and events.

The journal Bathyscape, currently on its 4th issue, is a project, involving many talented locals and is a bilangual (English/French) Montreal publication that one should keep an eye on.

More information on:

http://www.lebathyscaphe.blogspot.com/

Translated in French by Josée Kamoun

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist, born in 1933. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodby, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honoured authors of his generation: Roth’s books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral.  Everyman was published in the US 2006 and in France in 2007.

Everyman – we never know his name –  has been married several times. He has two sons from his first marriage who resent him for leaving their mother, and one daughter from his second marriage who treats him with kindness and compassion, though he divorced her mother after beginning an affair with a 24-year-old Danish model, who subsequently became his third wife. Having divorced her as well, he has moved in his old age to a retirement community at the New Jersey shore, where he lives alone and attempts to paint, having passed up a career as an artist early in his life to work in advertising in order to support himself and his family. The book traces the protagonist’s feelings as he gets increasingly old and sick, and his reflections of his own past, which has included his share of misdeeds and mistakes, as he ponders his impending death.

Philip Roth by Matthew Bandsuch for NYTimes (May 7, 2006)

When I started to read Roth ten years ago, I was not very found of his writing. I would rather read his homonym Henry Roth. Both have this desire to ask questions about their middle-class Jewish-Americans, but if I really enjoyed Roth (Henry), I was not convinced by Roth (Philip) style . At this time, I devoured the Mercy of a Rude Stream’s four toms by Henry Roth: Une étoile brille sur Mount Morris Park (A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park), Un rocher sur l’Hudson (A Diving Rock on the Hudson), La fin de l’exil (From Bondage) and Requiem pour Harlem (Requiem for Harlem) and scraped Philip Roth after reading Portnoy et son complexe (Portnoy’s complaint), La Tache (The Human Stain), Opération Shylock : une confession (Operation Shylock: A Confession), etc.

Perhaps, I was too young; perhaps I couldn’t understand the difference between erotic and pornographic at this time, perhaps I couldn’t appreciate contemporary authors…. Because I don’t think that Philip Roth has changed, I think I have changed. When I moved to the US 18 month ago, I bring in my luggage Pastorale Américaine (American Pastoral) and Le Théâtre de Sabbath (Sabbath’s Theatre) and I started to discover really his novels, to appreciate his sense of body, of pain, of his sexual desire description… With Everyman, Roth has dealt with the destiny of a man and of everyman. A superbly work I have read in a great French version.

My name is Marlène. I am starting this blog as part of my online marketing class.

I decided to talk about the books I am currently reading. I am very found of American literature, which I usually read in French. So, I’m going to write about great American books translated in good French in a badly written English blog.

Yet, reading has nothing to do with logic, so let’s start!