Published by Random House UK, 2008, softcover, 318 pages, condition: new.
Young Man Hogan's journey begins in the dazzling streets of a nameless necropolis, and leads across fleeting landscapes - deserts, seas, mountains, islands, cities and great plains - to countless entertainments and adventures in four continents. It is an exploration and a celebration, glittering and exuberant, of the writer's art and of life itself.
"I would like to be able to write to you, as though in a letter, all that I am living through. I would like so much to be able to make you understand why I have no choice but to go away one day, without a word to anyone, without explanation. It is an action that has become necessary, and when the moment has come (I cannot say where, or when, or why) I will carry it out, just like that, simply, keeping quiet about it. Everyone thought, everyone had ideas, longings, words, and that whole lot stayed hidden inside their skulls, their bowels, even their clothes, and one could never read everything that had been written.
But, in fleeing, shouldnt I turn round from time to time, just a quick glance, merely to see whether Im not perhaps going too fast, whether people are still following me? Hmm?There is nothing to understand, nothing at all. There are no chains of events, no reasons. Got to keep moving at all costs. The nothingness was so great that it could not even be called solitude any longer. It was like walking on top of oneself, crawling eternally over the same bit of ground at the bottom of a crevasse. It was like being spreadeagled on the ground, without respite, or being fastened down on an esplanade in the middle of a desert of automobiles. It was like floating on the ocean, thousands of miles from land, while tiny waves sweep forward in ripples. The very idea of solitude had vanished from the surface of the earth; it had been swallowed up by the sand, gulped like water. Everything had been instantly filled to the brim; the sky had been stretched taut, an invincible ceiling harder than steel. The black mountains reared up, the dunes were frozen in mid-movement; the line of the horizon lay close to the sky, a thin black thread that never ceased to contain, to retain. And above, the sun was a glowing dot, nothing but a dot. It would have been impossible to add a single thing more: this was a world crammed full to overflowing, a world with a bulging bag, standing guard against intruders. There was no room for anyone. I am nowhere. I have left my world behind, and have not yet found another. That is the tragic adventure. I have departed, but not yet arrived."
This bold and inventive novel is the work of a tremendously talented writer and both an intoxicating and exhilarating read.
J.M.G. Le Clezio was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2008. He was born in Nice, France, in 1940 to a French mother and her first-cousin, a Mauritian doctor of French origin who, being born in Mauritius when the island was under British rule, held a British passport. However, the family was completely Francophone. Jean-Marie Le Clezio has travelled extensively and is articulate in English and Spanish, but his true homeland is very much the French language. He spends his time between France (Nice, Paris and Brittany), and Albuquerque New Mexico.He has published more than 40 books since he won the Renaudot Prize in 1963, age 23, with Le Proces-verbal (The Interrogation), and his works have been translated around the world into 36 languages.
