nobel prize restores french literary

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris guardian.co.uk, Friday October 10 2008 00.01 BST The Guardian, Friday October 10 2008 Article history

The cult French writer JMG Le Clézio yesterday won the Nobel prize for literature, lifting Paris out of its depression over the nation's cultural decline.

Le Clézio, known as France's "nomad novelist", lives mainly in New Mexico in the US, in near seclusion, and is the opposite of Paris's current trend for writers' navel-gazing accounts of their sex lives.

The Swedish jury hailed his scathing critiques of urban western civilisation and the "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" of his stories of native populations in Africa and Latin America. His novels, whose settings range from the Sahara to Mauritius, are expected to see a massive sales boost in Britain, where he is currently out of print and barely known.

Le Clézio, 68, last year signed an open letter with other writers appealing for French literature to be more open to the wider world. Last night he batted off talk of French cultural stagnation. "I deny it," he said. "It's a very rich, very diversified culture. There's no risk of decline."

In Paris Le Clézio is seen as one of France's greatest living writers. He says his work is defined by his mixed roots. He was born in Nice but most identifies with the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his Breton ancestors fled in the 18th century and lived for generations before returning to France.

He has joint Mauritian citizenship and calls the island his "little fatherland", describing himself an "exile" who grew up steeped in its mixed culture and traditions. His father, a Mauritian doctor with British citizenship, moved the family to Nigeria when Le Clézio was a child, before returning to Nice. Le Clézio studied in Britain, taught at universities in the US, Mexico and Thailand and travelled extensively with his Moroccan wife, writing about mixed relationships, and postcolonial and indigenous cultures.

Le Clézio, who publishes books at a rate of around one a year, shot to fame in France as a 23-year-old with his first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (The Interrogation), a portrait of a young man's mental illness. It won critical acclaim and a major literary prize, and his looks saw him dubbed French literature's Steve McQueen. Yesterday French media still referred to him as a blue-eyed "elegant cowboy".

Le Clézio became popular in France in the 1970s and 80s with novels set across the world. His big breakthrough came in 1980 with Desert, an award-winning novel of French colonialism seen through the eyes of a Tuareg woman in the Sahara. Since 2000 he has focused on stories of childhood and post-colonialism, drawing on his own family stories.

The Nobel jury said Le Clézio "stood out as an ecologically engaged author", citing his novels Terra Amata, The Book of Flights, War and The Giants. They called him an "explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".

His acceptance speech at the ceremony in December is likely to have a political slant. A defender of Creole writers who face problems getting published, he said yesterday he would use the speech to campaign for the promotion of young writers outside the metropolitan elite. He is also vocal about war, women's rights and child prostitution in the developing world.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said: "Jean-Marie Le Clézio is a citizen of the world, son of all continents and cultures. A great traveller, he embodies the influence of France, its culture and its values in a globalised world."

Apart from the 2000 win by the Chinese-born Gao Xingjian, who has French nationality, France has not won a Nobel literature prize for over 20 years and has been desperate for a return to the golden era of winners such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Gide.

Nobel award restores French literary pride• Winning author denies France has stagnated
• Country dreams of a return to days of Sartre

'A beautiful portrait'
"This [the portrayal of the protagonist, Ethel] is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful portraits Le Clézio has ever written, flickering, fragile, never closed in on itself, never frozen in marble or gripped in the vice of oppressive psychological certitudes.

"Its autobiographical role has been reduced to the simplest of expressions. So no confusion or confession, just a simple gesture of intimacy... [Le Clézio] does not give any moral lesson. Subtle and generous, but at the same time highly skilful ... his art is all about compassion and empathy - and also rebellion. It is rare to enter with such emotion into the feelings of fictional characters."

• Extract from Le Monde review of Le Clézio's latest novel, Ritournelle de la faim (Chorus of Hunger)