Le Clézio's heroes have been described before now as the heirs of Meursault and Antoine Roquentin, and this is very plausible. The beaches of the Riviera correspond closely to those of Algiers, and all Camus's feeling for the poignant evanescence of natural beauty seems to have passed into Le Clézio, who first came into prominence just about the same time the elder writer was killed. The comparison with Sartre's first novel is justified by Le Clézio's characteristic preoccupation with the endless multiplicity and yet separateness of everything, the world being presented as full and over-full, a 'furious labyrinth, a great living, palpitating mass, like a giant body sprawling on the ground and living its thousand blended lives'. But whereas for Roquentin there was nothing but nausea in this cram-full earth, for Chancelade [the protagonist of Terra Amata] such plenitude induces easy ecstasies. Formally, Terra Amata is another womb-to-tomb history. It has its gimmicks—a love-letter in morse, a poem in Polish, the table of contents turning up in the last chapter but one. Most people would not recognise it for a novel, not even a 'new novel', unless the definition of that term be stretched to cover any writing which undertakes to divorce the novel from its bossy helpmate, social history, and remarry it to art.