[In the following positive review, Di Bernardi praises Printemps et autres saisons for reexamining the oft-addressed themes of nationalism and racial purity.]

J. M. G. Le Clézio's newest collection of short stories, Printemps et autres saisons, might be more accurately described as a novella and four stories, and more aptly titled “Five Young Women.” Writers commonly exploit images of the opposite sex as vehicles for examining broader themes. These narratives, all written in Le Clézio's trademark impassive (and at times disappointingly deadpan) style, are focused on foreign women, mostly North African, whose (mostly failed) encounters with a variety of French males furnish the basic story lines.

For example, “Fascination” romantically evokes a man's pursuit of an ever-elusive Arab woman he first saw performing in a restaurant. “Le Temps ne passe pas” (“Time Doesn't Pass”) recounts the aborted romance between two teenagers, torn apart both by racial strife and economic necessity. “La Saison des pluies” (“The Rainy Season”) depicts the European exile of a woman named Gaby, who has left true love behind in the tropics. Finally, in “Zinna,” perhaps the single wholly unsuccessful story of the collection, we are presented with a rather skeletal and stale melodrama concerning a certain Zinna, a North African discovered by a producer and turned into a “goddess” of the entertainment world only to fall into equally sudden obscurity, a precipitous and predictable slide climaxed by a suicide attempt. The melodrama feels musty, reminding this reader of the sort of star turn only the likes of Josephine Baker might have breathed new life into during her French film career.

Yet Le Clézio makes an important addition to his voluminous oeuvre with the title novella “Printemps” (“Springtime”). In the simplest, most unpretentious way possible the author presents us with an initial situation: the apparent rescue of a young girl abandoned in war-torn Algeria by the well-meaning Colonel Herschel and his wife. With a steady hand, the narrator slowly unravels this presupposition and redefines his tale as the young girl returns to the land of her ancestors. During her stay she discovers the truth of her mother's oppression and courage, a woman who defied tribal custom, became pregnant with her out of wedlock, and left her in the care of the retired American couple at their farm, Nightingale, to follow her lover to Europe rather than be forced into a face-saving marriage by her family.

It is Le Clézio's poignant reconceptualization of home and roots—the mother's land is literally an immigrant's new world—which both gives a new spin to an old theme and invests it with a timely resonance in the context of a Europe in the throes of multicultural conflict and self-redefinition. In “Springtime,” this apolitical novelist has written an affecting tale that subverts the outmoded narratives of nationalism and racial purity, still the rallying cries of neo-Fascist forces on both sides of the Atlantic.