Ritournelle de la faim by J.M.G. Le Clézio
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The splendid opening chapter is dominated by the figure of Uncle Soliman - and as a representation of the French Belle Epoque, is as close to perfection as I have ever read. Everything in this short portrait shows Le Clezio's visual mastery, from the description of the moment (the umbrellas opening like dark flowers, Paris "smoking under the warm rain") to the description of the period (Ravel's Bolero premiering, the Universal Exhibition and its East Asia theme, the colours of the not so far XIXth century so marvelously rendered in the description of the "Maison Mauve").
Unfortunately, Uncle Soliman quickly dies. With his death, we do not only turn the page on the most brilliant period of France and Europe, but also on the most brilliant moment in Le Clezio's novel. From now on, style seems to fault him. The recent French Nobel Prize shows that he knows his topic. However, for someone who on the year following the publication of this book was to receive the most prestigious award in literature, he also shows an inexplicable lack of rigour. He jumps from present to preterit to past perfect in the same paragraph, sometimes in the same sentence. His other characters lack depth to the point of caricature (such are Chemin the coward or the ignominious Talon). His very main character, who we get to understand later may be his mother, grows from the age of twelve to within her twenties without much emotional building. The context itself is weakly rendered : we go through six years of war almost without noticing. The topic of the book itself, hunger, is entirely contained in the description of an old woman scraping rotten fruits and vegetable at a market in Nice around lunch time. It is as if, tackling a personal subject, Le Clezio had found himself at odds with it, not knowing whether to treat it with emotion or detachment, which part to give to the background, whether to engage in the internal conflicts of his character or stay neutral.
All this makes for a readable novel. But from an author at the pinnacle of his production cycle, I was really expecting better.
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