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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.

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