Description
Book SynopsisFrom the WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 'A work of bewitching beauty and humanity' Chinua Achebe In 1948, a young J. M. G. Le Clezio left behind a still-devastated Europe with his mother and brother to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he had been separated by the war. In his characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the Nobel Prize-winning author relates both the child's dazzled discovery of freedom in the African savannah and the torment of recalling his fractured relationship with a rigid, authoritarian father. Now available to UK readers in English for the first time, The African is a poignant memoir of a lost childhood and a tribute to a father whom Le Clezio never really knew. His legacy is the passionate anti-colonialism that the author has carried through his life.
Trade Review'Haunting' The Guardian 'Le Clezio is ever the master at rendering existence at the level of sensation with a daring and admirable freshness of language' New York Times 'Author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization' Swedish Academy, 2008 Nobel Prize 'Mr. Le Clezio is like a post-Darwin Rousseau, decrying the ruination of indigenous cultures around the world' Wall Street Journal 'Le Clezio's book is as much a speculative biography of a man he now realizes he hardly knew as a memoir of a complicated childhood. It is a memory palace, a deliberately disordered evocation of the past that hopscotches through time' Boston Globe 'A vivid depiction of a splintered childhood and the lovely wholeness procured from it' Kirkus Reviews
