KLÉBER HAEDENS

[The following excerpt is from a translated essay, the original of which appeared in Le Nouveau Candide.]

It's certain that right now J. M. G. Le Clézio has no intention of striking out on a different path. His new novel, Le Déluge [translated into English as The Flood], repeats his favorite theme without let-up: loneliness in the crowd and the constant threat of death.

Up to page 46 a somber verbal flood carries everything along with it in a tide of bad days. "Men and women were no longer alone very much; they formed a crowd. And in that barbaric chaos you were lost." Yes, we are lost in this barbaric chaos where a confusion of images replaces style and thought. We glimpse the features of a city: its buildings, streets, advertising, cars. Maybe we are already dead. Somebody is getting hell ready for us.

But there is a faint glimmer of light amidst these shadows. On a January 25th, at 3:30, without any visible reason, a siren goes off. At the same moment we see a young girl appear on a motorbike. The girl rides off, disappears between two rows of houses. Immediately, the siren stops. "There was nothing left but silence. And nothing, nothing, not even a vivid memory will remain in our minds. Ever since that day everything has been rotting. I, François Besson, see death everywhere."

Why does the sight of a young girl accompanied by the whine of a siren suddenly cause the world to rot, why does her disappearance plant death in the brain of a young man twenty-seven years old? That is J. M. G. Le Clézio's secret….

As for the novel's characters, François Besson is not much better than an animal. He seems to be deficient in both will and reason…. This silly and feeble individual gives rise to such boredom that to follow him in his activities is real torture. The landscape he traverses and the people he meets are cut to his measure. (pp. 378-79)

Le Clézio seems to lose himself in his dramatis personae and wallow in their unfathomable blues. "No one is sick longer than he wants to be," said Montaigne. The author of Le Déluge and his heroes have decided to be sick day and night until death overtakes them. The weak spark of existence that animates them gets lost in the crowd, and they sink into the verbal dough in which the novel holds them captive. The deluge that destroys them consists of words….

Failure, despair, suicide, death: Le Clézio doesn't seem capable of talking about anything else. Even though I felt there was a generous portion of the literary in all this, it began to bother me….

[What] life is to Le Clézio [is] a zero, and the whole book is just a morose translation of this nothingness. (p. 379)

What to do about it? To walk for hours in the rain, sit on benches, wander in the night, drink water from public fountains and wait. Le Clézio shows himself at his best in delineating this program. He hasn't lost the gift of making us see things: the street at dawn, the shopwindows, women shopping, the wind, the rain, the big yellow dog that gets killed at the cross-roads. But all this was already present in Le Procès-Verbal, and with much more energy, more spontaneous richness. Le Déluge is an unnecessary repetition. (pp. 378-79)