STOCKHOLM // The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced today. His first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (The Interrogation), published in 1963, cast Le Clézio as part of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) movement spearheaded by Alain Robbe-Grillet. But he defied easy classification and rapidly became a cult author, a lonely chronicler of the perils of modern life, particularly urban living.
A passionate admirer of two other great travellers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, Le Clézio, now 68, won the Renaudot award in 1963 for Le Proces-Verbal, France's second most prestigious literary award after the Goncourt prize. His latest novel Ritournelle de la faim (Same Old Story about Hunger) released this year has been hailed as breaking new ground, exploring French guilt over its wartime past.
"Jean-Marie Le Clézio is a great French monument who towers over our literature," said Franz-Olivier Giesbert, a literary critic. Le Clézio was born in Nice on April 13 1940 to an English father and French mother; the family had roots in both Brittany and the Indian Ocean island state of Mauritius. He went on to study literature, and taught briefly at the Bristol university and the University of London.
In the late 1960s he travelled to Mexico and Panama where he spent several months among the Emberas Indians. It was, he later said, "an experience which changed my life, my ideas about life and art, ways of being with others, of walking, eating, sleeping, loving and even dreaming". His fascination with other ways of life has led some critics to describe his work as "metaphysical fiction", a questioning of traditional forms of being.
"I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that," he said. "If I had to venture into philosophy, I'd say I was a poor Rousseauist who hasn't really figured it out." The Swedish Academy hailed him as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation". He has written more than 20 novels, including La Guerre (1970, War), Mondo (1978), Desert (1980), Le Chercheur d'Or (1985, The Prospector), Onitsha (1991) and Etoile Errante (1992, Wandering Star).
Wandering Star and Onitsha have been translated into English.
In 1994 the readers of the French literary review Lire voted him "the greatest living French-language writer."
Le Clézio divides his time mainly between Mexico and his home in Nice.
*AFP
