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Terra Amata
For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, "Terra Amata" brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.
217 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
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432 people want to read
About the author
J.M.G. Le Clézio
152 books649 followersJean-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.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
March 1, 2018
Terra Amata is a kind of new existential novel. J.M.G. Le Clézio’s narration is too mannered and form dominates content.
The main character doesn’t live, he just exists surrounded by the triviality of this material world and his existence is but a set of game combinations:
Man is a chip in some cosmic board game and like any game life consists of the beginning, the middle and the end… That’s all.
He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices. He’d been travelling all his life in order to arrive here, in hell, to burn with all the others in this hideous yet delectable furnace; yes, it was undoubtedly hell, but it was unimaginably interesting. It was solid life, life compact, thick as syrup, dense, bitter, sweet, nauseating, narcotic, the strange whirlwind that swept up all in its path. Resistance was vain. The crowd broke over you like a wave and you were carried away in its febrile dance.
The main character doesn’t live, he just exists surrounded by the triviality of this material world and his existence is but a set of game combinations:
You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn – you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.
Man is a chip in some cosmic board game and like any game life consists of the beginning, the middle and the end… That’s all.
March 16, 2013
Terra Amata is either a visionary masterpiece or cheap apocalyptic schlock—either way, the end product is a strange and wonderful mixture of Michael Bay and French existentialism. Chancelade is a perpetual boy traversing the stunningly evocative language of this novel. His surroundings shapeshift from sentence to sentence, allowing him occasional moments of beachside lucidity or ludic Oulipian antics, but mostly, he’s like a cyberpunk Scheherazade, caught in immense thickets of doom-laden prose, thundering out the page like a pulpit preacher seconds before a meteor impacts the earth like in the Permian period, drenching the world in one billion trillion tonnes of seething hot lava for over 80,000 years. A novel that runs entirely on opaque imagery and surreal lyricism isn’t an easy sell, but Le Clézio succeeds by speedballing his prose with urgency, lunacy, and a black we’re-all-going-to-die humour, otherwise known as “gallows.” I can’t think of a finer novel to get hanged from.
June 12, 2016
The author leads us through the life of Chancelade from his luminous childhood till the end (or the beginning), telling us that the protagonist is going back to what was before, sun, clear air, peace, sea, strength, beauty; because everything is eternal, we are here all the time with the sun and the rain and the wind and the ice and the fire. Birth and death are only fables. In this timespan called life we are only playing the game with ourselves to lose as slowly as possible, suffering as little as possible, our enemy is us, we are fighting against time. We live in hell and heaven joined together so we must suffer and love.
There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny. One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth. Everything there was was there. You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers. You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so. You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.
*
How were you to say you were happy, at that moment, on that part of the earth, with that woman, with yourself, and with everything else? It wasn’t easy to say, and yet you had to say it. You had to forget the fatal issue, pain, decay, the minute but effective assaults of time. You had to forget the void, the being abandoned, the being alone, and live out your own adventure with joy. Nothing counted any more but this explosion of life, an explosion beautiful and unique. Out of the long night, opaque, insensible, there issued now this ball of fire more luminous than a million suns, shut up inside the body and blazing there. The glare is harsh, it hurts, it flays, but the pain is also the greatest of pleasures: it is the power of life. There were so many things to believe, so many things to love, hate, touch, drink, look at, feel, understand, listen to, judge, suffer, hope. There was so much fear, so much evil, gentleness, noise or cold. From farthest time or space this wealth had come to Chancelade, a man among men, an inhabitant of this planet, and had changed him into a bomb. Everything was there, present, palpable. It called for more than words, it called for shouting, for howling at other people at the top of your voice in the street. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood, but that’s what you ought to have done: open your mouth and yell as loud as you could at three o’clock in the afternoon with the veins standing out on your neck and temples bursting:
*
In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs. That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreen-wipers moan back and forth. A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb. Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs’ heads. A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake. Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly. A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.
On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime? What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world? There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder?
There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny. One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth. Everything there was was there. You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers. You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so. You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.
*
How were you to say you were happy, at that moment, on that part of the earth, with that woman, with yourself, and with everything else? It wasn’t easy to say, and yet you had to say it. You had to forget the fatal issue, pain, decay, the minute but effective assaults of time. You had to forget the void, the being abandoned, the being alone, and live out your own adventure with joy. Nothing counted any more but this explosion of life, an explosion beautiful and unique. Out of the long night, opaque, insensible, there issued now this ball of fire more luminous than a million suns, shut up inside the body and blazing there. The glare is harsh, it hurts, it flays, but the pain is also the greatest of pleasures: it is the power of life. There were so many things to believe, so many things to love, hate, touch, drink, look at, feel, understand, listen to, judge, suffer, hope. There was so much fear, so much evil, gentleness, noise or cold. From farthest time or space this wealth had come to Chancelade, a man among men, an inhabitant of this planet, and had changed him into a bomb. Everything was there, present, palpable. It called for more than words, it called for shouting, for howling at other people at the top of your voice in the street. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood, but that’s what you ought to have done: open your mouth and yell as loud as you could at three o’clock in the afternoon with the veins standing out on your neck and temples bursting:
*
In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs. That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreen-wipers moan back and forth. A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb. Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs’ heads. A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake. Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly. A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.
On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime? What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world? There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder?
February 2, 2009
This was my second Le Clézio book. Terra Amata, the Beloved Earth, is daunting. I would not recommend this as a starting point to reading Le Clézio's works. It deeply troubled me, depressed me, made me close my eyes for a while and try not to think.
The beginning had an interesting scene when the young protagonist, Chancelade, plays with a bunch of potato bugs. It was a riveting scene that ended in tragedy.
The book follows Chancelade throughout his entire life as the headings of the chapters may indicate:
On the earth by chance
I was born
a living man
I grew up
inside the drawing
the days went by
and the nights
I played all those games
loved
happy
I spoke all those languages
gesticulating
saying incomprehensible words
or asking indiscreet questions
in a region that resembled hell
I peopled the earth
to conquer the silence
to tell the whole truth
I lived in the immensity of consciousness
I ran away
then I grew old
I died
and was buried
This is an experimental novel reminding me a little of Italo Calvino. There was a section written in morse code, a section in sign language, C: Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up. This scene went on for 5 pages. And of course in the section called 'saying incomprehensible words' the dialog was something like this, "Woolikanok mana bori ocklakokok. Zane prestil zani wang don bang."
But even with it's quirky (yet effective) 'tricks', I found the book deeply depressing. The section 'I died' ripped me. I felt it was I breathing that last death rattle. And when I was finally buried, only then did I sigh with a bit of relief... at finishing this book.
Le Corbusier said that God was in the details. We are in the details. We are that pebble on the beach, the heart that was pierced on the battle field in 1812, the potato bug walking aimlessly around the sidewalk, we are the words of this book, the sun, the stars, the mole under the girls left breast, and that layer of rock between the granite and flint. This book is full of details.
I think having a beer with Le Clézio back in 1963 may have been a downer. But then, I am beer also, and I am the belch of relief after having one too many.
I gave it 4 stars for successfully messing with me.
The beginning had an interesting scene when the young protagonist, Chancelade, plays with a bunch of potato bugs. It was a riveting scene that ended in tragedy.
The book follows Chancelade throughout his entire life as the headings of the chapters may indicate:
On the earth by chance
I was born
a living man
I grew up
inside the drawing
the days went by
and the nights
I played all those games
loved
happy
I spoke all those languages
gesticulating
saying incomprehensible words
or asking indiscreet questions
in a region that resembled hell
I peopled the earth
to conquer the silence
to tell the whole truth
I lived in the immensity of consciousness
I ran away
then I grew old
I died
and was buried
This is an experimental novel reminding me a little of Italo Calvino. There was a section written in morse code, a section in sign language, C: Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up. This scene went on for 5 pages. And of course in the section called 'saying incomprehensible words' the dialog was something like this, "Woolikanok mana bori ocklakokok. Zane prestil zani wang don bang."
But even with it's quirky (yet effective) 'tricks', I found the book deeply depressing. The section 'I died' ripped me. I felt it was I breathing that last death rattle. And when I was finally buried, only then did I sigh with a bit of relief... at finishing this book.
Le Corbusier said that God was in the details. We are in the details. We are that pebble on the beach, the heart that was pierced on the battle field in 1812, the potato bug walking aimlessly around the sidewalk, we are the words of this book, the sun, the stars, the mole under the girls left breast, and that layer of rock between the granite and flint. This book is full of details.
I think having a beer with Le Clézio back in 1963 may have been a downer. But then, I am beer also, and I am the belch of relief after having one too many.
I gave it 4 stars for successfully messing with me.
July 5, 2012
somebody explain to me why I'm supposed to take this guy seriously
May 6, 2013
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.
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.
October 21, 2025
040513: this is kind of the object case that robbe-grillet For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction has in mind when he insists it is not what the true author says but how he says it. no, not much happens in this life portrayed, but the resolution of these sensuous, imagistic, vignettes of life is very affecting for me. how the story is told is what the story is told...
September 1, 2011
Le clezio is close to being my second favourite author ,first being Dostoyevsky!
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February 5, 2010Based on two books (this, and The Book of Flights) I'm convinced that young, experimental Le Clezio was a worthy writer. After the initial "J. M. G-who?" in the American press - the reaction that accompanies every new Nobel Prize in Literature - a lot of these literary hacks went out and bought some of the newly reprinted Le Clezio novels (originally published in the 1960s and pretty much out-of-print since then) then proceeded to dismiss them all as "dated" (a favorite dismissal from the oh-so-cutting-edge) experimental novels that weren't worth reading before going on to bemoan the Academy's idiocy at having overlooked Don Delillo and Philip Roth. Much of Terra Amata doesn't play well for me, and the young author too often indulges his fondness for jeremiads, but the book is shot through with magnificent scenes - starting with its opening chapter, a slightly sarcastic interrogation directed at the reader: Why buy this book? What do you hope to get out of it? etc etc
December 7, 2008
When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.
Read my full revire here.
Read my full revire here.
June 21, 2011
One of the most visceral reading experiences of my life. This is a vivid account of the highs and lows of one man's life, but presented in such a way that he represents Modern Man and the unique psychological/spiritual experience of humans.
This is one of my favorite books, which is why I gave it five stars despite several experimental sections that don't really work that well. This book is an exciting glimpse at how personal and true and life-changing experimental literature can potentially be, even if not completely successful here.
This is one of my favorite books, which is why I gave it five stars despite several experimental sections that don't really work that well. This book is an exciting glimpse at how personal and true and life-changing experimental literature can potentially be, even if not completely successful here.
May 20, 2020
"He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices."
This lyrical and boldly experimental novel is an allegory for the genesis of humankind through the life and lens of its protagonist, Chancelade.
Through the novel, we see instances of his life. As a child, Chancelade likes to play on the beach. As he grows older and his consciousness awakens, he becomes perceptive to the innumerably beautiful details in the small things he encounters. He finds universes etched within grains of sand. Grand unrecorded dynasties in ant colonies. Every leaf, object, insect, animal, planet has a name and enduring history for its existence. Chancelade grows older and drifts through other instances of his life. He finds love. Has a son. Becomes wrinkled and frail. His body weakens. He dies. He is buried. But through it all, his consciousness absorbs every experience and his body bears a mark of everything he has ever felt, heard, seen, known, and encountered. He is the novel that records its voyage through time.
It is hard to categorize this book as belonging to any specific genre. It is simply a series of fragments depicting intimate details of a sentient being observing the world as it grows from a child to an old man.
Le Clézio's writing is very experimental and his stylistic choices might well split readers. But there's no denying that his prose has a breathtaking, timeless quality delivered with poetic magnanimity. Some of the passages I came across in this book were downright beautiful to read.
This is a flawed novel but the universality it tries to encompass is what makes Terra Amata such an intimate reading experience. 3.5 stars.
This lyrical and boldly experimental novel is an allegory for the genesis of humankind through the life and lens of its protagonist, Chancelade.
Through the novel, we see instances of his life. As a child, Chancelade likes to play on the beach. As he grows older and his consciousness awakens, he becomes perceptive to the innumerably beautiful details in the small things he encounters. He finds universes etched within grains of sand. Grand unrecorded dynasties in ant colonies. Every leaf, object, insect, animal, planet has a name and enduring history for its existence. Chancelade grows older and drifts through other instances of his life. He finds love. Has a son. Becomes wrinkled and frail. His body weakens. He dies. He is buried. But through it all, his consciousness absorbs every experience and his body bears a mark of everything he has ever felt, heard, seen, known, and encountered. He is the novel that records its voyage through time.
It is hard to categorize this book as belonging to any specific genre. It is simply a series of fragments depicting intimate details of a sentient being observing the world as it grows from a child to an old man.
Le Clézio's writing is very experimental and his stylistic choices might well split readers. But there's no denying that his prose has a breathtaking, timeless quality delivered with poetic magnanimity. Some of the passages I came across in this book were downright beautiful to read.
This is a flawed novel but the universality it tries to encompass is what makes Terra Amata such an intimate reading experience. 3.5 stars.
July 7, 2019
Holy hell. Picked this one up off the shelf at the local library with no idea where it would take me, in fact I only glanced at the blurb, the Prologue was so similar to how I picked up the book it made me feel like J.M.G Le Clézio had read my mind.
It took me into the dark beautiful heart of what it is to be a human living on this planet. Starting at the point of the individualism of insects and ending with the atomic bomb. Jesus Christ, some serious truth telling and an aching book. It took me a while to read (although light and dainty as an object) it was thick and heavy with poetics at times causing me to drift into a meditative state, he's like a professional hypnotist. Some pages were so dense it was too much to bring my eyes to finish sentences, like looking into a forest rich with tangled undergrowth.
A cerebral study worth hacking through it with a machete, you will be left with some hefty calluses.
It took me into the dark beautiful heart of what it is to be a human living on this planet. Starting at the point of the individualism of insects and ending with the atomic bomb. Jesus Christ, some serious truth telling and an aching book. It took me a while to read (although light and dainty as an object) it was thick and heavy with poetics at times causing me to drift into a meditative state, he's like a professional hypnotist. Some pages were so dense it was too much to bring my eyes to finish sentences, like looking into a forest rich with tangled undergrowth.
A cerebral study worth hacking through it with a machete, you will be left with some hefty calluses.
July 6, 2021
I'm not sure how to feel. This book took all of the fun out of the endless possibilities of the meaninglessness of life. Which is a weird sentence to write.
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January 12, 2025is there such a thing as optimistic existentialism?
March 13, 2025
m
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 6, 2009
Confusingly enough, many people seem to think that this novel is not Terra Amata, but rather another of Le Clezio's novels set in Mauritius?
The novel I read was about a man Chancelade, and his (rather pointless) journey from life to death. And although it was not explicitly set anywhere, it seemed to be in France (by the sea).
The best thing about this novel, as with, The Flood, is it's absolutely gorgeous language, le Clezio manages to make incredibly mundane events and ideas seem incredibly rich and fascinating, often while telling us the pointlessness of said encounter!
I think if this novel was read at a fast pace, the way you would a more conventional one, a lot of the intricate and beautiful details would be lost, it really needs to be lingered over (it took me nearly two months, and it is not very long at all) and absorbed slowly.
Granted, there are flaws in this novel though. One really doesn't need to be that bothered with actually reading the long chapter where le Clezio describes the actions of the hands as the two characters talk in sign language, or the infamous 'speaking in incomprehensible words' chapter. However, the fact that they are included is very important in the authors intentions and aesthetic, even if actually reading and understanding is secondary. The ending of the novel does drag on a bit too long than necessary as well.
All in all though, it really is a very good novel that once one invests time and effort into soaking up its language really will pay off very nicely.
The novel I read was about a man Chancelade, and his (rather pointless) journey from life to death. And although it was not explicitly set anywhere, it seemed to be in France (by the sea).
The best thing about this novel, as with, The Flood, is it's absolutely gorgeous language, le Clezio manages to make incredibly mundane events and ideas seem incredibly rich and fascinating, often while telling us the pointlessness of said encounter!
I think if this novel was read at a fast pace, the way you would a more conventional one, a lot of the intricate and beautiful details would be lost, it really needs to be lingered over (it took me nearly two months, and it is not very long at all) and absorbed slowly.
Granted, there are flaws in this novel though. One really doesn't need to be that bothered with actually reading the long chapter where le Clezio describes the actions of the hands as the two characters talk in sign language, or the infamous 'speaking in incomprehensible words' chapter. However, the fact that they are included is very important in the authors intentions and aesthetic, even if actually reading and understanding is secondary. The ending of the novel does drag on a bit too long than necessary as well.
All in all though, it really is a very good novel that once one invests time and effort into soaking up its language really will pay off very nicely.
June 18, 2012
I picked this book accidentally and I couldn’t help marvelling at the simplicity and honesty the introduction has. Captivated I began. There is no story as such (for it can be the story of any random person). It rather felt like dairy entries.
Reading this was as good as a roller coaster ride-there were times when I found it enchanting and at times it became unbearable that I wanted to shut it permanently. Reflections on the journey we make as men on this earth is what this book dwells on (I am being extremely naive trying to summarise). The conclusion is nothing less than perfect. But there were many aspects that I missed, of that I am sure, and I will revisit this book to discover more.
Reading this was as good as a roller coaster ride-there were times when I found it enchanting and at times it became unbearable that I wanted to shut it permanently. Reflections on the journey we make as men on this earth is what this book dwells on (I am being extremely naive trying to summarise). The conclusion is nothing less than perfect. But there were many aspects that I missed, of that I am sure, and I will revisit this book to discover more.
December 7, 2009
"Too bright and pure to be anything but darkness"
should be better than it is, there is a dragging inconsitency to its marvels. jean-marie gustave le clezio has a wonderful name and he is gifted at discerning and evoking sadness, the weariness of thought, the irrational communion of childhood and night-terror - i especially loved the sections 'Happy' + 'And The Nights'. then his habit of listing repetitiously and using ciphers as characters tired & drove the enjoyment out of me. I particularly thought 'In A Region That Resembled Hell' was a piece of crap and I don't understand the point of the morse code/sign language/nonsense word sections. i still look forward to reading his others.
should be better than it is, there is a dragging inconsitency to its marvels. jean-marie gustave le clezio has a wonderful name and he is gifted at discerning and evoking sadness, the weariness of thought, the irrational communion of childhood and night-terror - i especially loved the sections 'Happy' + 'And The Nights'. then his habit of listing repetitiously and using ciphers as characters tired & drove the enjoyment out of me. I particularly thought 'In A Region That Resembled Hell' was a piece of crap and I don't understand the point of the morse code/sign language/nonsense word sections. i still look forward to reading his others.
October 16, 2013
I enjoyed Terra Amata so much such that if my French were better I may endanger upon a terrific pun such as, «Je suis heureux que j'ai eu de la chance de lire à propos de Chancelade»; alas I do not so I settled for slyly dispensing a feeble one. Sorry.
April 6, 2009
Brilliant in parts, eminently skimmable at other parts.
September 16, 2011
the poetry which is life..
Dear Clezio
you taught such a lot...how to live every minute,every second
thank you gracias bonjour
Dear Clezio
you taught such a lot...how to live every minute,every second
thank you gracias bonjour
May 31, 2021
Amazing
July 1, 2016
It took me 6 years to read this and catch up on my French Nobel Prize winners. What an incredible book. A labyrinth of beautiful writing...
March 17, 2009
reading...
September 12, 2014
Blew my mind. More than once.
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