Read this book in French. Not an easy read, I must say. The writing style is rather poetical, with lots of elements typical for magical realism. The perspective goes back and forth between 1910 (a little boy Nour and his family on the run for French colonial troops in the Moroccan desert) and the present (the girl Lalla, living in a shantytown on the Moroccan coast). There are a lot of connections between the two characters (they even seem related), but the most important connecting element is the magic of the desert. Le Clezio describes the desert as full of life and light, life-giving and pure. This is stressed by a short stay of Lalla in the French harbourcity of Marseille: the city is the real desert, killing everything human. In my opinion Le Clezio clings too much to the typical Western myth of the noble wilde (in this case the desert-nomads, the blue men), and his story is too black and white. But all in all, this is a very beautiful book, written in very imaginative French, and offering a quite different view on reality. Set in two timeframes, 1910 and decades later possibly the 1970s, Desert is a story of wandering and migration. In 1910 the Blue Men of the Sahara undertake a fruitless march to fight against French colonials. Illequipped, badly provisioned, and accompanied by women, children, the elderly and the ill they marched aross the desert in a trek destined for failure. Amongst their number is Nour a young, impressionable boy and as his story progesses he ultimately has to accept failure due to betrayal and defections.The second timeframe is the story of Lalla, a strange, enigmatic, beautiful & determined daughter of the same tribe as the Blue Men. She too undertakes a perilous migration from her homeland across Europe and faces many ordeals and trials.This book is ultimately about the clash of cultures & the demands of modernity versus tradition.While interesting, I found it repetitive & somewhat of a trial to read - there are only so many times you want to read descriptions of the heat of the day and the cold of the night in the desert.
What do You think about The Desert (1966)?
Very impersonal narration. "They came from the hills..." Couldn't get into it...
—Dan
