Caught in the Crossfire

Without a doubt, French literature is one of the most influential and important components of literature in Europe, if not the entire world. Over the course of history, France has produced some of the world’s most prominent writers. Avid readers are familiar with names such as Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, among others. These are names that have withstood the test of time as they remain relevant in contemporary literary discourses. The influences of their works, such as Hugo’s Les Misérables, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, are finely embedded in many contemporary works of literature.

French literature is a citadel of literature. A further testament to this is the number of Nobel Prize in Literature laureates it has produced. With sixteen Laureates, France has produced the most Nobel Laureates in Literature, the most recent of which was Annie Ernaux, the 2022 honoree. Among the sixteen laureates France produced is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, more familiarly referred to as J. M. G. Le Clézio. Le Clézio was a literary prodigy who exhibited interest in writing when he was seven years old; his first story was about the sea. At the age of twenty-three, he published his first novel, Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation). An unsolicited manuscript submitted to the Gallimard publishing house, Le Procès-verbal was a literary success that earned Le Clézio immediate recognition.

From that point on, there was no way but up for Le Clézio. With every new release, he kept reinforcing his mettle as a storyteller, wordsmith, and literary critic. Over the years, he deftly crafted a credible and extensive oeuvre that covered a vast spectrum of genres such as novels, essays, literary criticisms, travelogues, and even children’s books. He set himself apart from his contemporaries. His works gained him accolades in his native France and from other parts of the world as well. In their selection, the Swedish Academy aptly cited him as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

“Nights are long when it’s cold and you’re waiting for a train. I wasn’t able to sleep a single minute, despite the fatigue, despite the emptiness all around me. I kept looking around, as if to make sure that nothing had changed, that everything was still real. I looked at it all, the immense station with its glass dome with the rain streaming down, the platforms strecthing away into the night, the halos around the lamposts, and I thought: so here I am.“

~ Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Wandering Star

Among his extensive list of novels is Étoile errante. Published in 1992 in French, it was translated into English in 2005 with the title Wandering Star. Spanning four decades, from 1943 to 1982, the novel charted the fortunes of two teenage girls following the end of the Second World War. Their individual threads intertwine with the proclamation of the state of Israel. The first of the story’s two main characters is Esther, a French Jew who was thirteen years old when the novel commenced. Esther’s family, along with other Jews, were the main occupants of the French alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vésubie situated in the mountainous section of the French-Italian border, near Nice. Despite having found a place away from the atrocities of the Nazis, the Nazis remained clear and present threats. The threat they posed lingered on the peripheries.

With the Italians controlling the region, Esther and her fellow Jews were cognizant of the threat the Nazis posed. They were forced to assume new identities and names. Esther, for instance, called herself Hélène. Meanwhile, Esther’s father was a member of the Resistance and their house served as a safe house for the men of the Resistance. The threat of the Nazis soon materialized, with the Schutzstaffel inching its way into the region. This prompted the Jews to flee to Italy through the mountains. Esther and her mother Elizabeth were able to make it safely across, but unfortunately, her father disappeared. As soon as the war ended, Esther and her mother boarded the sailing ship Sette Fratelli. Thus commenced their long journey to the newly founded Jewish state of Israel.

The journey to the promised land, as expected, was fraught with challenges. A healthy portion of the novel documented Esther’s journey to Israel. Upon her arrival in Jerusalem, Israel’s War of Independence was approaching its conclusion. Her path then briefly intersected with Nejma, an orphaned Palestinian teenager whose thread formed the second half of the novel. The two wanderers were able to exchange names but soon enough, their paths again diverged. In the summer of 1948, Nejma found herself in the Nour Chams Refugee Camp as she was unable to return to the ancient city of Akkha, the city of her birth. Nejma was among the group of Palestinians expelled from their homeland following the Israeli declaration of statehood.

The refugee camp, however, was no utopia. Danger lurked in every corner. The conditions were not suitable for any normal human being and yet, the Palestinians were forced to deal with these dreadful conditions. They had no recourse as they were stripped of the rights of their homeland. The refugee camp was essentially akin to a concentration camp – something Holocaust survivors can relate to – where people die, not of genocide but of starvation and untreated diseases. The state of living was horrible, the people living miserable existences. Their conditions were overlooked, so much so that the denizens of the camp have become indifferent to these ugly and dark realities.

“She knew that winter was over when she heard the sound of water. In winter, snow covered the village, the roofs of the houses and the fields were white. Icicles formed on the edges of the roofs. Then the sun started burning down, the snow melted, and water started trickling drop by drop from all the roofs, the joists, the tree branches, and all of the drops ran together forming rivulets, the rivulets, ran into streams, and the water lept joyously down all the streets in the village.“

~ Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Wandering Star

Through the alternating stories of Nejma and Esther, Wandering Star explored the follies of wars and violence. Fear hovered above the air. The unmistakable stench of death pervaded the air. Warfare, unfortunately, is a constant state of the world. It is a reality that we cannot shy away from. But who pays the price for this? Who suffers the most? Unfortunately, it is not the men who are steering the war. Throughout history, it was the children who suffered the most in times of war. At a young age, their eyes forcefully witnessed things that normal children should not witness. They are dispossessed. They are unwilling participants and they have no other recourse.

Ironically, Esther escaped from one war only to be ushered to another. She was still young but wherever she went, she was haunted by destruction and tragedy. She was a survivor who bore witness to the follies of war. The same can be said of Nejma and her circumstances. She had to endure them alone. They were both in exile, uprooted from the places they used to call home due to circumstances beyond their control. While Wandering Star was a scathing look at the follies of war, it was also a compulsive coming-of-age story. We read about Esther’s sexual awakening and the budding attraction to the opposite gender; it was a reminder that they are typical teenage girls.

With the recent escalation of tensions between Israel and Palestine, the novel reminds its readers about the dangers of war and violence. The decades-long dispute between the two states is well documented, from the time of partition in 1948 until the present. The novel reverberated with political overtones that probed into some of the factors that led to these tensions. The novel provides grim details of the territorial dispute between the two states through the perspective of a young Israeli soldier. He referred to it as the last war, with Jews finally consolidating their possession of Eretz Yisrael. This, however, entailed the expulsion of Palestinians. Nour Chams still exists, with some refugees spending their lifetime there. The last war the soldier referred to would last for decades.

“But in a way, she’s glad to hear their voices, their raucous music, and their laughter. It proves that they are real, that all of this exxists, the slow sea, the blocks of cement, the sail moving through the haze. They aren’t going to disappear. She feels overwhelmed by the lightness of the air, the luminous haze. The sea with its ebb and flow, its bursts of refracted light, has entered her body. Its the time of day when everything vacillates, is transformed. It’s been such a long time since she’s known serenity, such detachment.“

~ Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Wandering Star

But Wandering Star was no political novel. It explored this seminal and sensitive subject with an objective gaze, bereft of any judgment. It captured the irreversible consequences that political choices and ideologies have on the lives of ordinary people. The plights of the Jews and the Palestinians, such as the Holocaust and the Palestinian refugee camps, were captured by Le Clézio without careening toward a single group of people. Both Esther and Nejma experienced miseries well beyond their imagination. Astutely woven into the novel were subtle critics of non-government organizations and their advocacy for humanitarian efforts in Palestine. In war, there are no winners as its consequences resonate well beyond its resolution.

Wandering Star is an apt description of the two characters. They were both in search of a semblance of home. Le Clézio was splendid in creating a sense of connection between humans and places while, at the same time, exploring the follies of exile, uprooting, and dispossession. European Jews, through Esther, believed Israel was their promised homeland, hence, the diaspora following the Second World War. This was enshrined in Jewish religious texts. Palestinians also believe it to be the utopia promised to them by their mythology. As one character uttered, “Does not the land belong to everyone?” It is a question that remains unanswered almost eight decades after the spark turned into a full-blown dispute, stoked by outside forces with vested interest.

At its heart, Wandering Star is a novel about conflict and struggles, with an emphasis on the tumultuous struggle between Israel and Palestine. Through the destinies of Esther and Nejma, Le Clézio wrote a moving story of survival. It is the story of the uprooted, of the dispossessed, of those who are forced to keep on wandering because of the circumstances surrounding them. It was a vivid picture of humanity. The lyrical quality of Le Clézio’s writing evocatively captured the horrors of war. What elevated the novel was the subtle reminder astutely woven into its lush landscape. The dispute between modern-day Israel and Palestine is more than just a news item that passes our timeline. Caught amid the struggle are real people with real stories to share and whose voices deserve to be heard.

“I didn’t know what I was looking for, what I wanted to see. It was like a wound in my heart, I wanted to see the evil, understand what had escaped me, what had cast me into another world. It seemed that if I could find a trace of that evil, I would at last be able to leave, forget, start my life over. At last I would again be able to travel, talk, discover places and faces, live in thn the present. I haven’t much time. If I don’t find where the evil is, I will have lost my life and my truth. I will continue to wander.“

~ Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Wandering Star
Book Specs

Author: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Translator (From French): C. Dickson
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Publishing Date: 2009 (1992)
Number of Pages: 316
Genre: Literary, Historical

Synopsis

Bearing witness to the boundless strength of the spirit, and based on his own experience as a child in World War II, J.M.G. Le Clézio chronicles the saga of two young women, one uprooted by the Holocaust and the other by the founding of the state of Israel. Esther, a young Jewish girl who travels to Jerusalem after World War II, crosses paths with Nejma, a Palestinian girl, whose story of life in the camps balances Esther’s own tale of suffering and survival. They never meet again, but in their respective exiles, they are forever haunted by the memory of one another. Wandering Star is a powerful coming-of-age story and, as Le Figaro notes, truly a luminous lesson in humanity.”

About the Author

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (familiarly referred to as J. M. G. Le Clézio) was born on April 13, 1940, in Nice, France. He descended from a Breton family that had immigrated to the formerly French and subsequently British colony of Mauritius. His parents’ ancestors were originally from Morbihan, on the south coast of Brittany. He was raised in the village of Roquebillière near Nice. In 1948 he, his mother, and his brother moved to Nigeria to join his father who was serving in the British Army.

Le Clézio is fluent in French and English. He moved back to France to complete his secondary education. From 1958 to 1959, he studied at the University of Bristol in England. He finished his undergraduate degree in 1963 at Nice’s Institut d’études littéraires (now the University of Nice). He earned his master’s degree in 1964 from the University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1983 he completed a doctorate of letters at the University of Perpignan, France. Le Clézio’s interest in writing started at a young age; he started writing when he was seven and his first work was about the sea.

He made his debut as a novelist when he was 23 years old with the publication of Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation) in 1963. The book was an immediate sensation, winning the Prix Renaudot. It was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. Le Clézio continued establishing a name for himself with the publication of the short-story collection La Fièvre (Fever, 1965) and the novels Le Déluge (The Flood, 1966), Terra Amata (Terra Amata, 1967. ), La Guerre (War, 1970), and Les Géants (The Giants, 1973). His most recent novel, Alma, was published. His oeuvre also includes a vast genre of essays, criticism, travel diaries, children’s literature, and memoirs.

Throughout his extensive and prolific career, Le Clézio received a score of accolades from his native France and from other parts of the world. Among these recognitions were the 1972 prix littéraire Valery-Larbaud, the 1980 Grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand, and the 1998 prix Prince-de-Monaco. In 2008, he was honored by the Swedish Academy with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Apart from these accolades, Le Clézio was made Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d’honneur on October 15, 1991, and was promoted to Officier (Officer) in 2009. In 1996, he was made Officier (Officer) of the Ordre national du Mérite. Beyond writing, Clézio has taught at several universities around the world including Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, and Nanjing University in China.

Since the 1990s, Le Clézio and his family have divided their residence between Albuquerque, Mauritius, and Nice.