Word: novels
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After attending university in Nice, Le Clézio achieved instant fame in 1963 with his first novel, Le proces-verbal, published in English as The Interrogation, a dark, wandering tale of a disaffected and possibly disturbed young man. It can be plausibly associated with the works of Sartre and Camus, but Le Clézio has never been easy to classify. Like the writers of the nouveau roman, he struggles with language itself and the ways contemporary life have drained it of meaning; he has often stated that his favorite novelists are James Joyce and Robert Louis Stevenson...
...person, the author possesses a remarkable stony expression that clashes with his movie-idol good looks; he projects a physical sense of the intense focus and purposefulness that powers his writing. His protagonists are often humble people who blossom in the face of difficulty. His most important novel is generally considered to be Désert, published in 1980 and largely set in the Moroccan Sahara. A lyrical, occasionally hallucinatory work, it deals with the marginalized but still fundamentally vital lives of African nomads, as contrasted with the bleakness of modern urban European life. "Western culture has become too monolithic...
...sense of displacement and alienation, of humanity from the natural world, of adulthood from the idealized homeland of childhood and of Western civilization from its own emotional and spiritual vitality. "We no longer have the presumptuousness to believe, as they did in Sartre's day, that a novel can change the world," Le Clézio has said. "Today, writers can only record their political impotence ... Contemporary literature is a literature of despair...
...latest novel available in English, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, is a wry coming-of-age account of a young woman's struggle to carve out a place for herself in the wider world. Set in contemporary Beijing, it peeks into the mind of Fenfang, a plucky dreamer who left her provincial sweet-potato-farming village in south China for the distant capital at the age of 17. Her youth, she tells us in the novel's first lines, began several years and odd jobs after that, when she finally succeeded in parting from her "peasant" mentality and realizing...
...You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?” Cordelia asked Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel. “Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas...it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear...