Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clezio here creates an adventure story which is also a coming-of-age story and an exploration of culture. Set in Mauritius, where his French family has deep roots and where he now has a home, the novel is unique—filled with lush descriptions and vibrant characters who appeal to the romantic in all of us while simultaneously evoking the violence and horror which mar their lives and make a mockery of “civilization.” The novel’s exotic setting inspires dreams of lost worlds, mysteries, and lives tied to nature and its beauties. At the same time, however, the author is exploring the damage wrought by foreigners whose sole purpose is to tame the land and use it for commercial purposes. The novel often resembles an allegory in that every phase of the action over thirty years teaches a particular lesson or emphasizes a theme, to which the author calls attention. Readers interested in becoming acquainted with Le Clezio’s writing may find this novel an ideal starting place.
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Set in the 1940s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical, as the author creates a morality tale which takes place in a country in which life’s most basic guiding principles are still undetermined. World War II has kept the British in Egypt as a foreign power, a weak Egyptian monarchy is under siege by reformers, and the army is growing. The plight of the poor is an urgent national problem. Among the four Cairo University students who open the novel, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. After graduation, however, a “friend” comes up with an unusual way for him to get a good job with the government.
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The last novella written by acclaimed Italian author Romano Bilenchi before his death in 1989, The Chill, written in 1982, is a coming-of-age story so universal that it could just as easily have been written in 1902 or 2002. Set in the mid-1920s, in the hill towns between Siena and Florence, the novella recreates the story of an unnamed narrator dealing with the pangs of adolescence so skillfully that the reader can easily associate it with the author’s own childhood—and though the setting is dramatically different from that of J. D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, or any of the other coming-of-age novels one might recall, the issues are similar, if not identical in many respects. With its focus on family history, death, friendship, love, betrayal, and revenge, this novella deals with the most important of life’s issues.
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Written in 1958, when the author was only twenty-three, this debut novel is stunning for its depiction of two societies–the society of peasant villagers who live in a remote and nearly inaccessible mountain village, and a society created by young delinquents when they are abandoned and blockaded inside this small village. Away from normal society, the boys are free to express their own emotions, and the narrator and others quickly show their inner humanity. The narrator’s much younger brother, an innocent, depends upon the narrator, who is protective and warm towards him, with several people protecting also the young daughter of the woman who died from plague, a girl who was abandoned when the villagers evacuated and left all the “undesirables” behind. As the boys help each other, the author creates a real sense of pathos about their sad predicaments. Passages of great beauty–especially the morning in which they discover snow–contrast with the misery of their attempts at survival. Five days later, everything changes.
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Henry Smart, born at the turn of the century, leads such a miserable childhood that he is on the streets by the age of five and solely responsible for his younger brother Victor by the age of nine. Always cold, hungry, and lacking a warm place to sleep, Henry and Victor are at the mercy of the elements, so concentrated on staying alive from moment to moment that they have no time to think toward the future. By the age of fourteen, Henry has met up with other poor who have some of the same resentments he has toward those who have dominated the land and commerce for so long. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood takes over the General Post Office on Easter Monday, declares the establishment of a new government, and raises its flag, and Henry is there–not out of a sense of patriotism so much as a sense that he is at home–and is fed–when he is among these people. When the shooting starts, Henry’s first bullets are aimed not at the British or at the police, but at the store window across the street, which he sees mocking him with its shiny new boots, something he has never had.
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