Frenchman Le Clezio wins literature Nobel

Only two weeks after Swedish Academy secretary Horace Engdahl chastised American literature as "too insular" to rise to Nobel Prize status, the academy yesterday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to French novelist and essayist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio.

Le Clezio, 68, a critically acclaimed author of more than 40 books, has long been a distinguished poster boy within French literary life for adventurous transcendence of Western and non-Western culture.

In the citation accompanying the world's richest literary prize, worth about $1.43 million this year, the academy praised Le Clezio as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

That "reigning civilization" would be the West. The author, whose family hails from the island of Mauritius, though he grew up largely in France, has lived in Nigeria, Thailand, Mexico, South Korea and Panama, written frequently of indigenous American culture, and taught at such far-flung institutions as the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and Ewha Woman's University in South Korea.

"I am very moved, very touched," Le Clezio said in accepting the prize, which his countryman Jean-Paul Sartre famously rejected. "It's a great honor for me."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared the award "an honor for France, the French language, and the French-speaking world."

Le Clezio is the 12th French winner of the literature prize, whose laureates include Claude Simon and Romain Rolland but not Marcel Proust. Although Americans annually win a disproportionate share of the science Nobels, no writer from the United States has won the literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.

Le Clezio came to his cosmopolitanism from a remarkable family background. His English father and Breton mother were cousins, both named Le Clezio, with connections to Mauritius. Born in Nice in 1940, Le Clezio at 8 moved with his parents to Nigeria, where his father, a doctor, had been stationed during World War II.

Growing up bilingual in French and English, he studied at Bristol University in England, received an undergraduate degree at the Institut d'Etudes Litteraires in Nice, a master's degree from the University of Aix-en-Provence, and a doctorate from the University of Perpignan with a thesis on early Mexican history.

His first novel,

Le proces-verbal

, translated as

The Interrogation

, appeared in 1963. A critical success,

it sold more than 100,000 copies. French literary hostesses feted what one called its "frightfully good-looking" author. (Several of Le Clezio's later books have also been best-sellers in France - he's no fringe figure, even if that American "insularity" has left most of his books untranslated here.)

Subsequent books, such as

Le deluge

(

The Flood

, 1966),

Le livre des fuites

(

The Book of Flights

, 1969), and

Les Geants

(

The Giants

, 1973), established him as an experimentalist whose passion for nature recalled Camus, an opponent of modern technological society's despoiling effects, and a pronounced sympathizer with life's displaced, dispossessed and marginalized.

Le Clezio's critical view of European civilization especially surfaced in the novel that made his reputation,

Desert

(1980), through the eyes of immigrants such as the main character, an Algerian young woman and guest worker in Marseilles named Lalla.

Several of Le Clezio's early essay collections grew out of his experiences living in Mexico and Central America among native peoples. He lived in the jungle with the Embera tribe of Panama from roughly 1967 to 1970.

He has complained in interviews about critics who see him as a Frenchman "gone native" to extol "the noble savage." He counters that he is more someone interested in expanding the limited "rationalistic" mind-set of Western culture to include spiritual dimensions of other peoples. Yet even the academy itself yesterday cited Le Clezio's "attraction to the dream of earthly paradise."

Le Clezio's later work takes a more accessible, autobiographical direction.

Révolutions

(2003) features a main character who shares many of Le Clezio's enduring concerns and much of his personal history, from student days in Nice, London and Mexico to a Breton ancestor.

L'Africain

(2004) is built around the life of Le Clezio's surgeon father and the family's Mauritian heritage.

Le Clezio has also translated works of the American Indian tradition and written several children's books. Over the years, he has won a range of French literary prizes. In more than one interview, Le Clezio has spoken of himself as an "itinerant," an "exile" whose main home is "the French language."

See more at the Nobel Web site via

http:// go.philly.com/nobelprize