The Giants

by J.M.G. Le Clézio

Upon an immense stretch of flat ground at the mouth of a river bathed in sunlight rises Hyperpolis. It stands there, surrounded by its four asphalt car-parks, to condemn us - a huge enveloping supermarket. Each of us will see ourselves reflected in the characters who move mindlessly about Hyperpolis, but "The Giants" is a call to rebellion. This bold and inventive novel is the work of a tremendously talented writer and both an intoxicating and exhilarating read.

Genres: Fiction, France, Nobel Prize, Novels

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, better known as J.M.G. Le Clézio (born 13 April 1940) is a Franco-Mauriciano novelist. The author of over forty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Jordan West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equal parts Debord, Burroughs, Patchen and Watts, this unclassifiable, visionary work is a situationist/anarchist/gnostic/buddhist jeremiad in the form of a nouveau roman, a desperate and anguished yet defiant expose of the forces which imprison humanity from both without and within, and which by illustrating the limits of language and consciousness shows how to think without thought and gives voice to that which cannot be said.

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

all right. well. this is one hell of a book. i'm not even sure i liked it, to be honest, but it's one of those monolithic kind of things where it almost doesn't matter what you think of it, you just kind of look at it in awe and say: jesus christ, where the fuck did that come from???

when i first started it, it really seemed completely one of a kind, out of left field, but as i went i sort of began to fit it into place. it's definitely an outgrowth of the french nouveau roman, violently original and always pushing, pushing. it sort of switches back and forth between the razor-sharp physical clarity of robbe-grillet and the kind of wild and lengthy flights of metaphorical fancy you find in nathalie sarraute. the juxtaposition of these two styles in one book actually works really well. he grounds you in a kind of cold hyperreality and then all of a sudden you're off into these crazy abstractions that just go on and on and on. sometimes you (i) don't even have the slightest idea what he's talking about. then, just when you've almost given up, you're back on the beach with the pebbles and the gulls and the chemically blue water and boy chewing bubble gum. you're there a while and then you're off again.

the other thing it feels like is philip k. dick. not in terms of its story (what story?) but in terms of its setting and concerns. le clezio is a paranoid futurist, constantly spinning conspiracy theories, not so much about organizations and real-world groups but about life itself, about humanity's tendencies and capabilities and hidden needs and how we fuck ourselves over again and again. all this set in this weird semi-science-fictional 1984-consumerist giant shopping mall thingamajig.

i don't know, this book is nuts. also, i can see now why this guy won the nobel prize. not because this book is particularly good (both robbe-grillet and sarraute are shitloads better) but because it is 100% politically committed. you get the sense that le clezio was probably not a very pleasant person to be around. very smart and interested in humanity as a group but not by any means as individuals. i picture him sitting in a house somewhere really isolated raging to himself about the need for people to love one another. and that's really the weakness of the book: its emotional flatness. the guy seems to have three settings: anger, hopelessness, and joy at his own genius.

but what the hell, it's still pretty god damn impressive.

To be a beautiful machine one must first of all remove one's head. That is essential. One must get rid of all one's thoughts, all one's words, the whole garrulous pretentious structure. Thought has to be elsewhere, in the center of the body, in the arms and legs, and on the metal skin. That is the most painful part of it, because people are not too happy at the prospect of losing their head. They are so used to living inside their head like peculiar molluscs.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is that the way one becomes free? [...] suddenly a terrible emptiness, an appalling emptiness drills its hole through the skin of your back and bores right through you with its icy breath? One imagined that one was a thousand miles away from everything, sheltered, out of reach. But it was not true. One was there all the time. surrounded by the noise and violence, a slave among other slaves. Somewhere in the depths of one's being, the intellect's clockwork mechanism was making its balance-wheels oscillate and its cog-wheels click round. Nothing existed by chance. Neither the clouds in the sky, nor the armies of ants on the ground, nor the waves of the ocean. Words did not exist by chance. They were murmured into a woman's ear, and these words like matches being moved round on a cafe table-top to illustrate some point or other.
the man is able to stop and stare round him with his odd dead-fishlike eyes. The world balances for an instant above the abyss, slowly teeters, the falls; it rolls down the invisible slope, gains momentum, plunges faster and faster, the rolls away on its unknown course.
*
Perhaps one has stopped, once and for all, just like that, facing the sea,[...] after reaching the end of migration, yes, perhaps; after reaching the shore; and one is not going to embark, after all, for one has no place to go.
*
But words betray; these creatures that speak on your behalf are destructive. It would be good to be able to think, to be happy, quite simply, alone, without witnesses. It would be good if thought was erect and speedy, travelling far through the air, reaching out to objects and planets and suns. Such are the thoughts of trees rooted motionless in the ground, or the sea stretched out beneath the sun, such are the thoughts of birds and flowers and snow-capped mountains. But men inhabit a dream that they do not control. They live inside helices that are not their shells, thy drift through clouds of black, red, green smoke. ‘Help!’ is the word that people mouth in vain. Help. And the words rear backwards, like a snake beneath a foot, or like a scorpion, biting, stinging.

[Kamakana · Rating 3 out of 5]

130813: again- whoa. easier to read than 'war', great images, great rendering of this building hyperpolis, but again no immediate plot. things happen yes, but are viewed obliquely, atemporal, from multiple perspectives, and it is not very clear motives, actions, oppressive postmodern superstructure of the 'masters'...

who are 'the giants'? at first, there are only le clezio's dense, precise, particular descriptions of environment, human and postindustrial, dehumanizing, enveloping, inescapable, and though there are characters here- the boy who runs away from home to live on the pebble beach, the woman tranquility, the man machine- they serve mainly as conduits for this immersive world, and, perhaps typically, there are muted interpersonal relations but great effect versus the world...

there are the ever present manipulative forces of the masters, in everything from lights, whiteness, logos, concrete domes, pillars, parking lots, roads, reflective surfaces that do not reflect the human, from languages, surrealist dominance of the conspiracy of the masters, but they, in emotionless machines, in computers, in advertising, in propaganda, in brief extracts of other sources eg. pavlov experiments, despite all this they are not 'the giants'...

no, 'the giants' are actually the humans who struggle, who live, who rebel, who are humans against this entire world, and even when such rejection of the masters' plans does not succeed, there is a nobility in being human that hyperpolis and the masters and all the words, all the machines, can never defeat...

[Ganur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Left me with a special sense of political urgency and a new appreciation of human tendency, but an overwhelmingly confusing and intangible experience! Le Clezio is at his best when describing human vulnerability to the vast forces of language, electricity, consumerism, and other un-human phenomena - but I found myself dazed and lost in the narrative more than once...
Excited to read 'The Interrogation' next

[Raisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le Clézio explores the forces that dictate human behaviour in "The Giants", a sprawling work which can be tough to read at times (to put it mildly). If you persevere though, I think you'll find it's worth it.

I hadn't even heard of Le Clézio before stumbling upon this book, but apparently he only won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008. Before that, though, it appears his work languished in relative obscurity, at least to English speaking audiences.

As I said before, this is a challenging read, mainly because it's so fiercely experimental. Broadly, Le Clézio explores and condemns the forces that shape human behaviour and society. It's a rant against consumerism, technology, language as a mode of communication, urban development - pretty much everything we consider societal progress. There's no plot as such, though there are a couple of characters whose story we follow. Le Clézio switches between 'reality' following one of the central characters, and then sort of meanders off in metaphor.

I love books which play with and explore language, even at the expense of plot. I love Rushdie for instance, and even managed to get through Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse". But the abrupt switch between story and flight of fancy was pretty tough even for me to slog through. What made it worth my while were the moments of pure genius. Sudden quotes emerge from a string of psychobabble and hit you in the face, full-force.

It's quite ironic that I enjoyed this book so much, given my field of work (the author mentions David Ogilvy as one of the evil overlords in the first chapter). Yet I found myself relating to a lot of the points that the author makes. Reading The Giants, you become uncomfortably aware of how much you mindlessly consume, all the little ways you let yourself be brainwashed. In this sense, this book is brilliant. It's sort of like The Fountainhead, in that it's the type of book you read as a hipster rebellious college student. You know, a Classic which you can quote casually at dinner table conversation to seem cultured.

However, it's so experimental that it's difficult to read or even categorise. I can see a lot of people just giving up in frustration. Also, the alternative Le Clézio poses (basically anarchy) isn't exactly feasible, because anarchy.

In conclusion, I'm giving this three stars with a question mark. As in... I think I liked it? I guess if you like reading strange meandering books, or are trying to impress aforesaid hipster rebellious college student, then this is probably for you. Go forth and free yourself. It is time, it is high time.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Giants is a tirade on consumerism, mega marts, urban progress (or decay), technology, language, and communication. The book surprised the hell out of me. The first few pages left me wondering if I could even get through it; it was preachy, long winded, and repetitive. But Clézio’s words started to have an effect on me. They started to excite me, drew me in almost hypnotically. I no longer looked at the page numbers or the clock. I had vivid dreams, that were influenced (possibly by the xanax I started taking) by the ideas, images, illusions, that were perfectly captured in words. Words. He trapped me with his words.

But heads are not equipped with an anus, and whatever enters their brain-pan is stuck there for ever.

Le Clézio creates a dystopian society in our own backyard. Even something as tranquil as the horizon (a razorblade)seen over the sea becomes oppressive.

There was this sort of thin wire that separated the sky from the sea, a scacely visible line just below the countless tons of weight of the air that pressed down upon the sheet of water: air and water were like two blocks of marble, one on top of the other.

Words, in this society, our society, today, are weapons used by ’the Giants’, unknown masters that tell us to buy Crest and use Mobile Oil and we really would be better humans if we just sprayed a little Chanel No. 5 on our skin.

There are so many sounds competing within a single head that the cranium might well explode like a bomb. Craniums are dangerous. When on sees them balanced on top of bodies, like that, row after row of them, one can feel a kind of tremor pass through them, and one knows that at any moment they might explode.

The plot, threadbare, is inconsequential and there are only three characters; Tranquility, an employee at Hyperpolis, the mega market, Machine, a trolley collector at Hyperpolis, and Dumb Bogo, a mute whose fascinated with the pebble beach near Hyperpolis. But the words are beautifully poetic.

[T.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most inventive and troubling novels I have read in a while. The book finely dissects the subversion of human experience through advertising, consumerism, cognitive science as used and abused by corporations, and the glitzy, shining facades behind which materialist culture and the idea of progress hide. It calls for rebellion, predicts the inevitability of a rising consciousness--a true consciousness and not a manufactured one--but one that is also inseparable from the inevitable and crushing defeats in store.

[Gustavo Krieger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is amazingly experimental, creative, and original. It faces the individual soul against the soulessness of machines. I believe if this had been written by a North-American on the 80's it would be considered a masterpiece, hailed by every newspaper and critic and translated to dozens of languages. But it was written in 1973 by a French, so people use to overlook it.

[sdv duras · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of Le Clezio's most interesting novels, a stylistic powerhouse mixed with a political urgency that is if anything more urgent now than it was when first published. A realism....a classic

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good, the parts that read like a radical manifesto are probably cooler than the parts focusing on characters, but it's good all round.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Every page of this book was filled with insightful thoughts, however, when I look back at the book as a whole, I would have a difficult time describing to someone what it was about.

[Brian Dahmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my youth I read this Sōseki-style, randomly opening the book to any chapter and reading it in isolation. My idea was to have a somewhat inexhaustible novel by my favorite author, and never really know if I've read the entire book. Its chapters lend themselves very well to this approach, as each is like a little story or essay, a riff on a set of recurring and terrifying themes. Every now and then, it would be like a Seinfeld episode coming on I'd never seen before. Othertimes it would seem entirely fresh, only for me then to slowly realize, oh yeah, I remember this part. However, this Fall I read the book cover to cover, and am pretty confident there were a couple chapters I'd never read before.

The book is difficult, like the truth. But not gruesome, the way some of Le Clézio's books would be in the 1980's and beyond, more like the way the communist manifesto is difficult. It spells out the way industrial consumerism is a form of psychic totalitarianism that lulls us into a coma like opium. It's a manifesto with characters, and loneliness, and smashed attempts at intimacy. It reads like a prequel to the Matrix, but rather than software the world is full of hard, ruthless machines with gear-teeth.

[Charlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books i have ever read. I can see why the upper class bourgeoisie love it though. Full of stupid metaphors and obviously the author is writing about the bleak pointless materialistic consumer driven society we now live in, but does in an obscure way as he possibly can which of course appeals to all the upper class wanabe intellectuals that we all hate but pretend we love at dinner parties.

[Tilly Stanley]

I don’t know what I just read and I can’t tell you what this book was about I literally don’t know what happened
Someone got tortured, someone got shot, electricity and just ?????? I’ve really never read a book like this in my life I’m going to be thinking about it for a while because WHAT WAS THAT ?

[Esther Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woah. Really really good... woah. Weird. Awesome. Going into my favorites list. He is so cool

[Lucas Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third experimental novel and the sixth book I've read by the Nobel Prize winner, Le Clezio. The Giants is highly experimental, but much more understandable than the others. That isn't to say this is easy to understand. How do I describe it? I guess we can call it a science fiction, 1984ish, anti-consumerism, anti-corporation novel that is, like the description states, a "call to rebellion." Who are The Giants? We are never told. What is the plot? Like Le Clezio's other books, it doesn't really have one. It seems like things come together at the end and it somewhat does, but I was left asking what happened. It's vague. The writing, like always, is amazing and unlike any other writer's; it's what draws me to Le Clezio's books. He can write about grass and I'd probably buy it. Like most experimental novels, this is hard to comprehend. For example, various pages has advertisements relating to how corporations subtly manipulate the consumer. They are from real companies too.

I can't really go on without giving away spoilers, so I'll say that it does make you paranoid like the narrator about who might be watching you. In this future world inside The Giants, unnamed forces are at work, with cameras watching you on every corner and listening to you in every room. Can that happen in the future? Well, it's somewhat happening in China right now, so you can say The Giants, written in the 1970s, has done well in predicting the reduction in privacy in the world today.

[Jap Hengky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The giants are the "master of words" (media, government, business system) who control people's freedom. LeClezio’s narrator actually believes the only real possibility for freedom is to quit using common words with other people; cease living in community and like Dumb Bogo, live totally alone and in a world without anything but a private one-person language.

[Jussi Mäntysaari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is a wild ride. At times it's like a novel version of Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, at times it's a dystopian futurist poem. Definitely situationist/leftist, but also eerily on point on where the society is on the 21st century.

I don't want to give too much away beforehands, but don't think this is just a bitter critique on capitalism, because it's a lot more than that.

[Lewis Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good but not brilliant, some parts were lacking.