Word: cl
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Wedlock we own ordain'cl...
...Camus and to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was all but ignored by student rebels in 1968. The art capital of the world has long since moved from Paris to New York, and the Parisian stage is languishing. New works from Alain Robbe-Grillet or from Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, France's best-known young novelist, are still occasions of note, but few other novelists are noted abroad. One exception is France's film makers, especially such directors as Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Swiss-born Director Jean-Luc Godard...
...Bahians into virile lovers, darkly sensual morenas, whores and neighbors, all larger than life. According to rumor, Dona Flor's friends are not the Bahian poor, but Amado's own circle of artists and intellectuals, whom he has costumed as peasants for a literary romp à clé. To that degree, Dona Flor is a long, savory inside joke. It is not, however, malicious, Amado too plainly believes that he lives in God's country. He may even be trying to provide some benevolent fat deity with a narrative blueprint for his own future return...
...sure, Le Clézio asks big questions, such as What is Life? with an earnest lyric gift. At times he captures the bubble-like transiency of youth with touching Gallic elan ("Who wrote 'I love you' on a cigarette paper and then smoked it? Who picked a flower and put it in a glass of water? Who ate a vanilla ice on September 14, 1966, at twenty-five minutes to midnight, thinking that it was an eternal ice-cream cone, an eternal ice, an eternal yellow-white flavour?"). He is also adept at playing those "In" games...
Such native stylistic ploys, like poetry, suffer dreadfully even in the best of translations, and this one, by Barbara Bray, is much too stiff-lipped, too unbendingly British. Ultimately, what does Le Clézio in, is his decision to mirror his Life-is-shapeless-and-meaningless view in its own terms. All arbitrary mood and no movement can't help making for a dull book. "Nothing is necessary any more," concludes the non-hero cryptically as he is being buried. "But neither is anything unnecessary." That phlegmatic formulation ought to come as some sort of wan, stoical triumph...