Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clézio A Nobel laureate on the birth of a nation. T here is a grim timeliness in the republication of Wandering Star coinciding with Israel's military offensive in Gaza. Le Clézio's novel is a moving account of the intersecting destinies of two teenage girls following the proclamation of the state of Israel: Esther, a Holocaust survivor and immigrant to the new Jewish state, and Njema, a Palestinian who is displaced by the partition of her homeland. The desperate battle for this territory is described by a young Israeli soldier in the novel as the last war, the war that will secure the Jews' possession of Eretz Yisrael. But Jewish settlement entails Palestinian expulsion and 60 years later the war continues. Wandering Star belongs to Le Clézio's second phase as a writer, when he embraced relatively conventional modes of storytelling complete with familiar devices such as characters, settings and plots. As a younger man he had renounced such devices. In 1963, at the age of 23, the glamorous Franco-Mauritian intellectual shot to fame with his anti-novelistic Renaudot prize winner, Le Procès-verbal, and he continued to publish experimental works into the 1970s. English translations of several of these have been reissued in paperback since Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year - from Vintage, Simon Watson Taylor's translations The Book of Flights, The Giants and War; and from Penguin The Interrogation, The Flood, Terra Amata and the story collection Fever. These are strange books, not so much coherent narratives as eruptions of consciousness, hyper-detailed registers of the phenomena of modern life intertwined with existential meditations. They have an air of science fiction or modernist allegory: dystopian fantasies about war, power, money and sex permeated with hatred and violence. Narrators return obsessively to questions about the human condition. Why are destruction and suffering ubiquitous? Can freedom or happiness ever be possible? But the only answers are pessimistic: "The war is everywhere." "Nobody will survive unscathed." This message provides a link between Wandering Star and Le Clézio's earlier works. The novel's dedication - "To the captured children" - reflects a concern with those caught up in conflict and in following the twin histories of Esther and Njema, Le Clézio returns to the problem of innocent victims he raised in War: "Is there - and this is the question, the real question - is there one girl, just one, whether she be called Bea or Eva or Djema, who has not experienced the war?" Wandering Star covers almost 40 years (1943-1982) and ranges from Europe to the Middle East to Canada and back again. By far the longest part is devoted to Esther's experiences before escaping to Israel, first in the French alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vésubie under the relatively benign occupation of the Fourth Italian Army and then, following the Italian surrender and withdrawal, her flight across the mountains into Italy. Esther's responsiveness to the beauty of the landscape is bound up with her sexual awakening under the competing attentions of two boys. The resulting narrative is highly charged with phenomenological and metaphysical awareness, sometimes to the point of overkill. Having said that, one of the most powerful qualities of the novel is the sense Le Clézio creates of the human connection to place and the anguish of exile and dispossession. "Does not the sun shine for us all?" asks one of the refugees in the novel. "Does not the land belong to everyone?" Persecuted European Jews like Esther are sustained in their ordeal by the Hebrew Book of the Beginning with its promise of a covenanted land, but in Palestinian mythology the same landscape is their God-given paradise. In chronicling the parallel sufferings of Jews and Arabs, Le Clézio gives us a sadly topical retelling of what he calls elsewhere "the greatest, most ancient of all quests: of a habitat". Tag Archives: J.M.G. Le Clezio. I have just finished reading J.M.G. Le Clezio’s historical novel, Wandering Star, which I found to be a compelling, mesmerizing, masterful and brilliant novel. The two main characters are Esther, also known as Helene, and Nejma. Their stories are told separately, yet blend as one. Esther is a Jewish girl who is coming of age during the Nazi invasion of France, when her family is forced to flee to the countryside. The village they seek refuge in is under the protection of the Italian military. Within the confines of village life Esther begins to view the lives around her, and we watch her slowly turn from naive girl to a young and aware girl on the border of womanhood. Her maturity eventually causes her to almost become mother-like and nurturing to her own mother, as they must eventually leave the countryside in order to board a ship so they can make their way to Israel. They are making the journey minus Esther’s father, as he is involved as a Jewish partisan. The trek from the village to the coast where they await the ship is arduous and plays not only on the mother and daughter’s physical strength, but their emotional strength, as well. Esther constantly thinks about her father, and loving moments that she had with him. She dreams of a reunion with him, of eventually having her family unit together and whole, again. Some of her thoughts and dreams take on almost mystical proportions, and Le Clezio’s ability to write with vivid imagery often overwhelms the senses with poetic beauty. His prose turns from delightful imagery to harsh reality, and back again, leaving the reader wrapped within the pages, unable to stop reading. Esther and her mother eventually reach Israel. Their ideal “promised land” doesn’t seem to be so promising, initially. Israel is in a state of flux. It is in the midst of its War of Independence, and devastation, destruction and fear surrounds them at every turn. They have left one life of turmoil and surpression for another life under almost similar conditions. Mother and daughter eventually become involved in kibbutz life, each with their own contributions to the whole. Within the daily life, there is an underlying horror occurring, the atrocities of the Palestinian refugees being herded into camps like cattle. Esther is witness to this, and her path crosses that of a young Palestinian girl named Nejma. Each girl looks the other in the eye, and can almost read the other’s mind. They exchange names on pages of a notebook. They are never to meet again, but each one remembers the other, thinking of them throughout the years. Nejma’s story is told in the last third of the book. It is relayed to us through her diary, which is an account, not only of her daily life, but the daily struggles involved as a Palestinian refugee repressed within the confines of camp life. From growing up by the sea, to surviving under the adverse conditions of desert terrain, we are a witness to the horrors and genocide of war from a differing perspective and environment, other than that of the Holocaust. We are witnesses to the cultural mores of time and place, and of repression of women. The air is often stifling, difficult to breathe in, yet Esther and Nejma inhale and exhale as best as they can given their circumstances. They are both survivors, strong, and remain hopeful within the brutalities of life and war. Wandering Star is a metaphor, in my opinion, for displacement and survival under the harshest of circumstances, circumstances that include glimmers of hope for a new beginning and better life . Wandering Star by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. It feels like now, in the aftermath of Israel/Hamas war, might be the saddest of times to be reading J.M.G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star. Yet I couldn’t help feeling, too, that this novel was confirming, affirming. The simple fable-like quality of the prose offered up a place where I found shelter from all the shouts -- the noisy rhetoric and rigid absolutes which seem to be filling up the media pages about Israel and the Arab World. Le Clézio has achieved a revisiting of modernist sensibilities which serve to place the subjective "I" into the center of our reader’s mind. This voice is a singular, isolated voice who is more witness than victim, and more reliable as the teller of historical truths than all the objective reportage we have come to rely on and believe in. Paradoxically, then, a literature based on subjective sensibilities serves to become one of our most objective looks into the Israel/Palestine conflict. Unlike the many "embedded journalists" (a term I always found sort of funny, imagining these Western newspaper guys stuck in sand dunes or ensconced inside rocky limestone caverns) this fiction reaffirms and redefines the possibility of the novel. Again, the novel can exist as a history-bearing fruit, immerse us inside a forgotten and buried world history. When the very writing of a novel asks the question: "can a novel be useful?" then, for me, the novel is once again operating at the top of one of its most exciting peaks. These questions were of course asked back when Sartre wrote his essay What is Literature? in Paris in the late 1940s, exploring, among other themes, the relationship between fiction and the writer's moral responsibility write truths important to social life and history. Sartre wrote: The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above all, the unique point of view from which the author can present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more freedom. Perhaps Le Clézio, because of his simple prose style and his child-like writer's eye, is more linguistically and formally subtle than other contemporary writers in bringing us into exigency, in asking questions about the possibility of personal freedom from within these crises, but he is no less gifted for being modest in his presentation. Le Clézio's work reminds me that the conditions for the performance of a "modernist" novel to be meaningful needn’t always be only formalistic if the novel is drawn from a soulful center. The very fact that it draws from subjectivity, allowing one personal consciousness to be the reliable teller of fact and situation can be as rich and wide a sweep as any other novel's framework and process. Where humanity continues to fester on a steady diet of its own wounds, the Middle East is caught in a kind of religious auto-immune disease which continues to inflame its divisive and turbulent regions. Abandoned to post-colonial chaos by 1947, it was forced to turn upon itself. The "Holy Land" has since acquired a lethal habit of perceiving each part of itself as an attacking bacteria, threatening its whole. Utter dissolution and annihilation is suffered at its own hands, and it has become increasingly confused, split into ethnic and religious corners all warring for a a defining center which they all shared in profound ways before colonialism and historical fates divided it. As a title, Wandering Star is a beautiful and simple floating lyric, capturing the nomadic journey of the Jew and refugee Arab Palestinian alike. It is a complex job to bring together the commonality of each ethnic/religious entity banished and exiled from the rest of the world and here, again, the imagistic tools of the poet and novelist are precious and rare in the light of the politics. Branded with the mark of the outcast and unwanted, the story of these parallel unassimilated groups searching for a home where they hope that "assimilation" in itself will become a meaningless term is graceful and made all the more heart-wrenching in its brutal futility. The existence and survival of the Arab Palestinians and Jews asks to be rooted in the spiritually sanctioned rights centuries have removed from them. Each believes unquestionably that some vibrant kind of stellar, supreme light from high above will shine on them, lighting their way. Though from very different places and cultures, and for very different reasons-the two opposing forces equally share in the shocks of this homelessness and in the tragedy of its irresolution, escaping into feverish, often intoxicating dreams -- ideal and romanticized as salvation and freedom -- which could be the stuff of one dreamer. Involving, engaging us in a primal personal sojourn where the reader feels the displacement of both peoples in balanced measures becomes the nightmare, the human tragedy often missed in the media, and in the myriad of lectures, conferences, and speeches of those so fortunate to not be experiencing the Middle East war as members of the families it irrevocably harms in violence and detached certainty about which side is "right" or "wrong". What this novelist will not give is readers the comfort of detachment, nor the luxury of abstract thinking. The prose creates an immediate, subjective, and personal reality told through third and person narratives, an experience of being from which there is no easy, abstract, political polemic treatise to exit on the wings on from here: a trapped place of profound hardship and horror. As I have mentioned, the two narratives in Wandering Star serve as point and counterpoint to one another. The first narrative is told through the eyes and of a young woman named Esther living in the South of France during the Nazi Occupation. Esther escapes with her mother over the blood-soaked mountains towards a dreamt destination called "Eretz Israel." The other narrative tells a story of a young Arab refugee, Njema, who is expelled from her home by the sea in southern Palestine. She is taken into a refugee camp in what will later become a hopelessly embattled and divided "Eretz Israel". The intoxicating winds of storms with the dark clouds; the caves where these fugitives hid during the nights, lighting candles and chanting, "the slow rocking of bodies while they chanted, and the whole cave vibrating and swaying like ship. " These are the images, the evocations of feverish dreams and idealizations coming from two bereaved girls, child-women perhaps. The Jewish girl, Esther, wandering in the first pages of this novel, has already lost her father. She doesn't know where he has gone or if he lived through the escape into the mountains at all. "They will wait," Esther tells us, "for a big motorized sailboat that would take all the fugitives on board and save them. The boat would cross the sea and take the Jews to Jerusalem. " Later in the same passage she tells us: "They talked of the city of light, gleaming with its domes and minarets in the land where the Jewish people originated. Maybe they dreamt that they’d already arrived and that the domes and towers of Valdieri were at the gates of Jerusalem." As Esther’s sojourn becomes perilous, Le Clézio writes: It was frightening but it was so beautiful that Esther wanted to go higher, closer to the clouds. They were floating between the heavens and earth and for the first time Esther could imagine how birds must feel. But they were in a world inhabited only by clouds, the trails of clouds, and lightning. Indeed, already it feels that Esther has comprehended the "magical name that she knew without understanding, the city of light, of fountains, the place where all the world paths meet, ERETZRAEL, ERETZRAEL." At a resting-stop in her journey there, upon realizing she has passed through and she cannot go back across the mountain to her life before. Esther becomes mysteriously stuck. "Everything had changed," Le Clézio writes through Esther's voice, "now that which existed on the other side of the mountains had become impossible. It dug out a hole deep inside of her, a window through which the emptiness crept in. an unreal window in which the sun was shining. but maybe it was only a dream she'd had just before the clouds closed around her." The story of Njema, a Palestinian Arab exiled to Nour Chams Camp during the summer of 1948 soon follows. As all the Jewish escapees embrace the future dream of freedom, of an "Eretz Israel," the same sounds of hope pound in the hearts of their now dislocated Arab Palestinians, expelled from their homes by the ensuing battles between Arab and Jewish forces which explode around them. Njema's story is one of many forced to leave their homes behind, load their furniture and belongings onto U.N. trucks and get transported to refugee camps scattered across the land. First came in United Nations tarpaulined trucks," Njema tell us ,"we didn’t know this place would be our new home. We all thought that it was for a day or two before taking to the road again. Just until the bombing and fighting in the cities ended, and then the foreigners gave us each of a plot of land, a vegetable garden to cultivate, a house where we could start living as we had before. They left everything behind, the livestock, the tools, and even their reserves of food and water. The women left their cooking utensils, their linens because they thought too they were only leaving for a day or two, just long enough for things to calm down. Later, she learns that the United Nations will be deserting them to these camps, and that the UN will stop giving them food and medicines, and "They would all die. They would become like the dry bush in the desert, the standing spindly against the winds, they would all all die. That's what the foreigners decided," she tells us, "And so we will disappear from the earth forever." She keeps asking rhetorically: "Why will the sun not shine for us?" In these passages, Le Clézio has, for me, captured a tragedy and made all the more powerful by simple, evocative and imagistic prose, a writing which is tender and purposely naïve -- it is as if two children, equally imprisoned somewhere in history, manufactured into enemies by foreign forces were separately told the same fairy tale and went out to search for it, unaware that each was going for the same stretch of magical spaces and land, a stretch impossible for them to inhabit together. In the end, the fever dream of the promised "Eretz Israel" was a cruel fatalism for each, Arab and Jew alike. There is so much to write about that arises from reading Le Clézio -- it's hard to say it all here. But this was a really important book for me to find. I'll be reading it again and again, and want to read more of his work. I can't help referring back to Sartre's question on whether or not "literature can be useful?" And reflect on something Camus said at the time in defense of criticism that Sartre's dark reasoning about what does exist for moral choices is at once brutal and enlightening all at the same time. As in Sartre, this tale of those lost in the quake of fever dreams seems to tell us about a state of human affairs sometimes too horribly painful and futile to bear. But, as Camus said of Sartre's work: "A great writer always brings his own world and its message. M. Sartre's brings us nothingness, but also to lucidity. And the image he perpetuates through his characters, of a man seated amid the ruins of his life, is a good illustration of the greatness and truth of this work." The questions that arise from Le Clézio's work become elegantly simple, too. As the novel is there to ask the questions, I believe, the nomadic cousins, Jews and Arabs, lost in this infinite desert become one mass of cries, all too humanly recognizable as a desire for unconditional grace and home, an existence in some primal womb-sphere, a birth for a people, instead of their death and end. Le Clézio has pitched their tent straight into our hearts and awareness, and done this masterfully in Wandering Star. He ends his novel with a final nod to the universal messiah myth. Le Clézio has one of characters yearn for what may be impossible, a "Child of the sun" who will be born to usher in a new world. "He would be the child of the sun," Le Clézio writes from within the voice of one of his characters, "he would be part of me forever, made up of my flesh and blood, my land, my sky. He would be carried by the waves of the ocean all the way to the sandy beach where we landed, where we were born. His bones would be the white stone of Mount Carmel and the boulders of Gelas and his flesh the red earth of the hills of Galilee, his blood would be the spring-water, the water in the torrent of Saint-Martin, the muddy water of the Stura and the water in Jesus’ well. In his body the force and agility of the shepherds, in his eyes would shine the light of Jerusalem. When I wandered in the hills in Ramat Yohanan over the dusty groves of the avocado groves, I had felt it already, the presence, the power. How could the others understand? They had a family, a place of birth, they had memories, I had nothing but that ball in my womb that would appear. a hole that opened onto another world, onto a dream. " How could others understand? might be the most salient of all the questions Le Clézio is asking. Sometimes it the work of the novel and the novelist to give us the tools of empathy and the insights of universality to be able to answer. Zawan's Blog. Wandering Star is a book by the French 2008 Nobel Prize winner J. M. G. Le Clezio . It tells the story of two women, Esther, a Jew who has to flee her town from Germans and is amongst the people who dream of doing to Jerusalem, and Nejma, a Palestinian girl who is staying at a refugee camp. The worthiest thing in this book is its lyrical prose. C. Dickinson has translated this book making keeping the beautiful poetic language in it: …”Then the music truly began, it sprang from the piano all of a sudden and filled the entire house, the garden, the street, it filled everything with its power, its order, and then it grew soft, mysterious. Now it was surging up, pouring like the water in the streams, it went straight up to the sky, to the clouds, mixed with the light. It spilled over the mountains, went all the way to the source of the two torrents, it was as powerful as the river”. Reading this book was very soothing, and it was like reading poetry. Wandering Star is also a beautiful story of survival, and how characters cope during difficult times. At the beginning of the book, Esther is a young girl living in Saint-Martin. She is living a blooming childhood, but she and her family have to line-up with the rest of the Jews to get their ration cards, and their place is controlled by Italians soldiers. Later, they have to flee to escape from German soldiers, and the story follows Esther and her mother’s way to Jerusalem through France (her father dies helping fugitives escape). After boarding the Sette Fratelli, she meets a Palestinian refugee, Nejma, for a brief moment. Then there is Nejma’s story, a girl who is staying at the Nour Chams Refugee Camp. Points of view sometimes change. I think this is a very deep story which goes beyond what is going on in the book. I felt that Wandering Star is more about portraying how people live during devastating times, and Le Clezio renders a mesmerizing conscience through his characters. I finished this book in only three days because the author really puts you through the mind of his characters and keep you absorbed in his melancholy book about human struggle and survival. Le Clezio is not very well-known, and in my opinion he should receive more attention than he is getting because he is a great author who has a different writing perspective and describes in lyrical prose. I liked this book because it focuses on the deep thoughts of the people and doesn’t comment or take sides on the conflict going on in the book. Instead of the book being mainly about the conflict surrounding the nations, it is about vividly portraying the human mind, and the conflict is just a backdrop in the book. Wandering Star by Clezio, First Edition. Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Wandering Star. Le Clezio, Jean-Marie Gustave. Published by Curbstone Press, 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. First Edition. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Wandering Star. Le Clezio, Jean-Marie Gustave. Published by Curbstone Press, 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. First Edition. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Wandering Star. Le Clezio, Jean-Marie Gustave. Published by Curbstone Press, 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: As New. Condition: As New. First Edition. Book in almost Brand New condition. Wandering Star. Le Clezio, Jean-Marie Gustave. Published by Curbstone Press, 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. First Edition. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Wandering Star. Le Clezio, J. M. G. / translated by C. Dickson. Published by Curbstone, 2004, 2004. Used - Softcover. First edition Near fine stiff wraps with strong spine and clean text throughout. Cover art by Ben Shahn, scarce. New and bright all around, gift quality. Wandering Star. LE CLEZIO, J. M. G. Published by Curbstone Press,, Willimantic:, 2009. Used - Softcover Condition: Fine. Paperback. Condition: Fine. A novel. Translated from the French by C. Dickson. Foreword by Adam Gopnik. First edition thus (expanded, paperback). Fine in illustrated wraps. ; 316 pages. Wandering Star (Lannan Translation Selection Series) Le Clezio, J.M.G. Published by Curbstone Press, 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket. Advance Reader's Copy. Uncorrected Advance Reader's Copy. A clean and unmarked copy in excellent condition. 316 pages. Wandering Star (First Edition) J.M.G. Le Clezio. Published by Curbstone Press, Willimantic., 2004. Used - Softcover Condition: Fine. Soft cover. Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. Softbound, trade paperback original. There was no hardcover edition. First printing. Fine. A tight clean copy. Shipped in well padded box. 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