JMG Le Clézio: Terra Amata

[beer good]

Terra Amata (1967)

The architect Le Corbusier reportedly said that God was in the details; others have claimed the same about the devil. And it's in the details that Le Clézio finds Terra Amata ("the beloved Earth", if my Latin serves); whether what he finds is God or Devil...

This is the first Le Clézio I've read, and supposedly not the best starting point - most people who have read him suggest his debut Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) as a sampler of his early avant-garde work, but this was the one that was still in the library, and I can't say it's scared me off further exploration. In fact, I liked it a lot.

Terra Amata is, in its way, a very bare-bones thing. It's the story of the life of a man named Chancelade (de la chance?), from his early childhood to his grave. And it's not like his life is all that special; he's a pretty ordinary guy, and not much out of the ordinary ever happens to him. What makes it more than just boring ultra-realism is how the story is told. See, Chancelade likes details. Right from the beginning, even as a small child, we see him extrapolating entire worlds from the smallest things, trying to understand his world by submerging himself in it, trying to put words to everything he sees and feels... the whole "cosmos in a grain of sand" bit.

You should be everywhere at the same time, on the mountaintops when the aurora borealis flares up, in the depths of the sea by the volcanos' mute explosions, in the trunks of the trees when the rain slowly starts falling and each drop detonates on each leaf.

Le Clézio's world isn't a cold, inhospitable place; it's a world that's teeming with beauty, and Chancelade wanders through it in constant infatuation, as if drunk on everything's existence and becoming. At times, this is a horriffic experience - anyone who's read The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy might compare it to the Total Perspective Vortex: if you see how insignificant you seem in the vastness of the world, you're supposed to go crazy. Except he doesn't, not really; he just has to find a way to live this incredible thrill ride of sensory overload that even an ordinary life can be.

The world was too alive, you couldn't defeat it. Space had too much space, time too many seconds, days, weeks, milennia. You could no longer do anything to understand. You could no longer meet the frightening gaze of the absolute. (...) You had to dive head-first into vertigo and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, give birth (...) because there was nothing else to do.

Writing something that goes more or less like this for 220 pages (well OK, there is ordinary life and dialogue and other characters in there too) requires a lot of the author, but the young Le Clézio is up to it - with a few notable snags; when Chancelade falls in love, he spends a few short chapters speaking in sign language, morse code and invented languages to try and express his inner turmoil... which, nah. But even then, the prose is... precise. I've rarely come across a writer who's this good at navigating rather complex existential morasses with a language that's this clear, vivid and, well... fun; like I've said elsewhere, I'm occasionally reminded of the extatic free-form prose of Clarice Lispector, while the slight meta-fictional overtones call Perec or Calvino to mind. OK, so the novel tends to crawl up its own ass a few times - I suppose you can only write so much about the experience of everyday mundanity, and the pro- and epilogues that talk directly to the reader don't really do it any favours. But most of the time, it's a real joy to read. As in life, you take the bad with the good, hope the latter outweighs the former, hold on in the sharp curves and feel the tickle in your belly.

Nerves, nerves everywhere.

NOTE: All quotes translated by me from the Swedish translation. My apologies to M Le Clézio and his English translator.