The African
From master storyteller J. M. G. Le Clézio: winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
The African is a work of bewitching beauty and humanity. With penetrating prose and an eye for lyrical detail, he vividly captures the rhythmic space of his memoir's African backdrop and makes bare the universal complexity of father-son relationships. A triumph!--Chinua Achebe
A short autobiographical account of a crucial moment in Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clézio's childhood. In 1948, young Le Clézio, with his mother and brother, left behind a still-devastated Europe to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he'd been separated by the war. In Le Clézio's characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the narrative relates both the dazzled enthusiasm the child feels at discovering newfound freedom in the African savannah and the anti-colonialism that became a father's legacy to his son.
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Awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio is a French-Mauritian author of over forty works. The Nobel Prize committee described him as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
Praise for The African
Le Clézio is ever the master at rendering existence at the level of sensation with a daring and admirable freshness of language.--Peter Brooks, The New York Times
J.M.G. Le Clézio has written repeatedly about ecology, landscape and colonialism, paying particular attention to Africa, Mexico, Central America and his family's native Mauritius. Given that he has produced more than 40 books, The African can represent only one aspect of, in the words of the Nobel committee, an author of new departures....Still, this brief memoir provides a good entry point, honoring, as it does, Le Clézio's father and mother and his own lost African childhood.--Michael Dirda, Washington Post
The past has receded, become so distant that no memory, no attempt to summon it can possibly bring it back. Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clézio tells us as much, even as his slim memoir, The African, valiantly attempts to call back a lost time. Le Clézio's book is as much a speculative biography of a man he now realizes he hardly knew as a memoir of a complicated childhood. It is a memory palace, a deliberately disordered evocation of the past that hopscotches through time.--Saul Austerlitz, Boston Globe
A slim yet resonant autobiographical entry from the Nobel laureate's early years in West Africa....A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it.--Kirkus Review
