French author wins Nobel literary prize
Published Friday October 10th, 2008
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio honoured for works of 'poetic adventure'
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - France's Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature yesterday for works characterized by "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and focused on the environment, especially the desert.
Le Clezio, 68, was cited by the Swedish academy yesterday as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
His works include "Terra Amata," "The Book of Flights" and "Desert," a 1980 novel the academy said "contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."
Speaking to reporters in Paris, Le Clezio said he was very honoured and the news left him feeling "some kind of incredulity, and then some kind of awe, and then some kind of joy and mirth."
Asked if he deserved the prize, he replied, "Why not?"
Le Clezio had been considered a strong contender and yesterday's announcement continued a decade-long trend of European and European-oriented authors receiving the Nobel, with recent winners including Britain's Doris Lessing and Harold Pinter, Austria's Elfriede Jelinek and Imre Kertesz of Hungary.
No American has won since Toni Morrison in 1993 and no American was expected to win -- Le Clezio did put in a plug Thursday for Philip Roth.
Last week, Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl told The Associated Press that the United States is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the centre of the literary world; Le Clezio may serve as Exhibit A.
A world traveller, especially of deserts, who has been ranked among France's greatest living writers, he is unknown to the U.S. public and to much of the U.S. literary community, even though he has a home in Albuquerque, N.M. Most of his books are unavailable in English and virtually all of those that have been translated are out of print, a common fate for writers from overseas.
"Unless the person being translated is extremely well known, the translation doesn't sell very well," says Judith Doyle, executive director of Curbstone Press, a Willmantic, Conn.-based publisher that in 2004 released the English version of Le Clezio's "Wandering Star," a novel about a French Jewish woman and a Palestinian woman.
Doyle said "Wandering Star" only sold about 1,500 copies, but expects that with the author "all of a sudden becoming known, we are going to print more."
The prize will almost surely raise sales for Le Clezio in English, but the Nobel bump is unlikely to last. Winners that sell best are those who write in English, including Morrison and V.S. Naipaul, or those already widely translated, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter Grass. Jelinek, Dario Fo and other laureates obscure to U.S. readers before winning the Nobel still have tiny audiences in America.
Le Clezio has published several dozen books, including novels, stories and essays.
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