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the complete review - fiction

The Prospector

by
J.M.G. Le Clézio

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : evocative novel of lost personal paradise

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Le Clezio has written it in a lyrical, leisurely style, full of foreshadowings and echoes, that is fiction's equivalent to a film director's use of soft focus. (...) The Prospector is a slow read, unlikely to appear any time soon at a drugstore near you. But it has beauty and power, and an ending that surprises and haunts us with its desolation." - Michael Harris, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "With its echoes of other famous quests, Alexis's search takes on mythical proportions and brings him face-to-face with the elemental forces of nature. The lyrical descriptions of the land and seascapes powerfully convey the entrancing rhythm of the waves that carry him on his journey and make The Prospector a novel of intense beauty." - Susan Ireland, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "Setting aside the question as to which of these competent and elegant translations is marginally better, it seems more interesting to consider why, more than three decades after it first appeared in France, The Prospector is a promising portal to the imagination of Le Clézio. (...) Dickson’s translation captures the hypnotic ebb and flow of Le Clézio’s prose. (...) Le Clézio lulls the reader into a hypnotic state, and the power of his prose reliably survives translation. His characters, lightly, almost mythically, sketched, often lie awake at night ‘eyes wide, listening to the rustling of the rain’, and so do his enthralled readers." - Ruth Scurr, The Spectator
  
  
• "It may well be supposed that Le Clézio's readers find his work attractive because, while scarcely distinguished by concern with the invention of individual "characters" in the conventional sense, it expresses an unusual sensibility towards a dimension wherein human beings can breathe naturally in response to the seasonal rhythms of the planet, and thereby recover some hope of achieving ultimate wholeness and serenity." - David Gascoyne, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The Prospector offers a wonderful one-volume compendium of all the grand myths rooted in the European colonial experience, combining elements from Paul et Virginie, Robinson Crusoe, and Indiana Jones. (...) Yet despite his lyricism, Le Clezio is decidedly anti-romantic. (...) Le Clezio has perfected a swift-moving, plain-speaking style, well served in this English translation. At times his overriding ambition to achieve the transparency of myth leads him to the sort of overstatement which flattens the emotional impact of his prose. But such missteps are few. This old-fashioned adventure tale ultimately leaves a postmodern aftertaste." - Dominic Di Bernardi, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Prospector is narrated by Alexis L'Etang, and begins with a description of his boyhood in late nineteenth-century Mauritius. With an unsuccessful father who tries to get the family out of their desperate financial straits but only winds up making things even worse, his childhood, shared with his beloved sister, in the isolated Boucan valley, home-schooled by their mother, is nevertheless idyllic:

     We never saw anyone during the time at Boucan, and Laure and I became utter savages.

for Laure and me the best was when we spoke of the day -- far away, of course -- when we would return home, to Mauritius, like old adventurers trying to recapture their childhood.

It was difficult in the beginning for me to live here because I didn't know anything about the Manaf way of life. I didn't know how to do anything. I couldn't run or fish or make a fire. I didn't even know how to swim. And I couldn't speak because no one spoke French, even my mother only spoke Bhojpuri and creole. It was terrible. I was fourteen years old yet I was like a little child.

Then I began to learn all that I didn't know. I learned to run barefoot on the rocks, to catch a kid while it was running, to make a fire, and to swim and dive for fish. I learned how to be a Manaf, to live like the maroons by hiding in the mountains. But I also liked being here with them because they never lie and they never hurt anyone.

Our life on Mananava, far from other people, is like an exquisite dream. We live like primitives, concerned only with the trees, coves, grass, and water flowing from the springs in the red cliffs.

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Links:

• David R. Godine publicity page
• Kiepenheuer & Witsch publicity page
• Le Clézio, traces et mémoire-site

• Kirkus Reviews
• liberreview
• The Los Angeles Times
• The Modern Novel
• The National*
• Publishers Weekly
• Seeing the World Through Books
• The Spectator*
• The Washington Post

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2008
• J.M.G. Le Clézio at books and writers
• Profile in The Telegraph

• The African
• The Interrogation

• See Index of French literature
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born in 1940. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature.

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© 2008-2016 the complete review

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