Wandering Star (Lannan Translation Selection Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: J.m.g. Le Clezio
Creator: C. Dickson
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 7636
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 340
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1931896119
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.914
EAN: 9781931896115
ASIN: 1931896119
Publication Date: October 1, 2004
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Product Description
“Wandering Star is a luminous lesson in humanity amid the ruins of civilization and intelligence.”aLe Figaro
“Wandering Star can unquestionably be ranked among the very great novels. This is true not only because of the precision and evocative power of the writing, the subtlety and balance of the construction, the magnitude and loftiness of the subject, but also because of the stature and the trajectory of the protagonist, Esther Greve, who survives the Holocaust only to be confronted in the land of her dreams with another tragedy.”aL’ HumanitA
"Those unfamiliar with Mr. Le ClAzio and his work should know that he is considered that rare beast by the French: an artist and a best-selling author."aDallas Morning News "This novel brilliantly depicts the universality of human suffering, but it also affirms the existence of kindness and understanding...Le ClAzio rises above politics and religious and cultural differences to express the girls' humanity in the struggles they both face."aMultiCultural Review "...the beauty of Le ClAzio's language belies the horror of his subject...We can only hope that Esther and Nejma might someday walk out of these pages, meet once more, and plant and nourish the garden that others battle so feverishly to destroy."aBloomsbury Review "Striking a delicate balance between despair and dignity, between incantation and prayer, in [Wandering Star], Le ClAzio touches upon each of the many themes he has addressed during his thirty years as a novelist, mixing and weaving them together into a story that combines elements of adventure, literary epic, confession, and history. It is at one and the same time a painful cry and peaceful sigh."aTAlArama "From page one, I knew I was in capable hands. J.M.G. Le ClAzio's novel of a young Jewish girl coming of age in wartime France is compelling."aBaltimore Jewish Times "Beautifully written and seamlessly translated by C. Dickson, Wandering Star is both a coming-of-age story and a powerful tale of survival. For readers hoping to better understand the world we live in, this book also helpt shed light on current events in the Middle East."aMoorishGirl "Le ClAzio goes beyond politics, cultural differences, and historical moments to cast light on the universal feelings in experiences of suffering and the struggles, desires, and dreams growing out of such experiences."aMidwest Book Review
"Le ClAzio has fashioned an intimate, searching novel about the price of war and exile."aStewart O'Nan "[An] exquisitely written story...I was struck by the beauty in the midst of the searing pain."aPenny Rosenwasser, author of Voices from a Promised Land J.M.G. Le Clezio is that rare combination of best-selling author and artist of the highest order. Wandering Star (A Lannan Translation Selection) received extraordinary critical praise in France. Pierre Lepape extolled it in Le Monde, noting that Le Clezio neither moralizes nor takes a political stance: “He goes much farther than that, much deeper; he seeks the signs of human misery and of potential peace at the very heart of life, in a confrontation with time and the elements; with the sun and the earth, with birth and death, with the mystery of origins and the enigma of the future, with the necessity of both remembering and forgetting, without which nothing can be healed."
Wandering Star tells two discrete stories of two young girls, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who meet once briefly by chance. Their stories are connected by substance, rather than plot. Each is a wandering star in search of a homelandaEsther escaping the Nazi Holocaust, and Nejma, who experiences the horrors of life in the camps. Yet through this novel of dark times and human suffering, affirmation shines as the characters encounter the beauty of nature and instances of human kindness and love.
Author of over thirty novels, essays, story collections, and translations, J.M.G. Le Clezio and his wife share their time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, the island of Mauritius, and Nice, France. He is the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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 "Wandering Star" by J.M.G. Le Clezio January 5, 2009
This book is the story of two very different girls and how their paths interminably cross in war-torn Europe. Esther is the primary character, a somewhat naive girl who progresses from sweet-natured child to resigned, pessimistic adult. Nejma, the other girl, is incredibly poor but has a great deal of hope, and progresses to a maternal woman in her shorter space in the novel. This is my first novel by Le Clezio, and I was a little underwhelmed by how the story was told. There are numerous instances where the small italian town that Ester's family is staying in is described in detail, and he does a good job in writing of the carefree nature of the town's children and how it is worn away by the beginning of the Holocaust. Esther and her mother leave everyone and make the trek to the Nour Chams camp, and again there are ad nauseum descriptions of their destitute life there. At the same time, however, there are some well-done, nuanced scenes with Esther coming more into her own and taking responsibility for herself. The character of Nejma is also a finely wrought portrait of a confused child growing up in an unhappy world, of which Le Clezio succeeds in telling. My main gripe is that when the girls find eachother, the moment is very brief and to me lacked the drama necessary to have made the girl's intrest in the other believable for the rest of the book. Not everything in a World War II novel has to be hyperbolically life-altering of course, and a simple human connection in the midst of chaos and despair is very noble indeed. However there isn't anything particularly urgent in the story either. Since it is primarily told through children's points of view, the Holocaust is only discussed in hints and asides, and much of the book is typical coming-of-age stuff that readers have encountered countless times before. Le Clezio is a gifted writer, and his dialogue and descriptions are beautiful to read. Overall it is a worthy achievement, and I hope for more distinguished translations of his works in the future.
 Exodus December 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
May 1948. The State of Israel has just been proclaimed. Two columns of refugees pass one another on a mountain road outside Jerusalem. One is a group of European Jews, now in trucks, nearing the end of their journey to the Holy City. The other, on foot, is a long straggling line of displaced Palestinians starting their own journey to nowhere. Briefly, the columns halt. A seventeen-year-old girl climbs down from her truck and comes face to face with another girl her own age. Their eyes meet. The Palestinian girl writes her name in a notebook, Nejma, and hands it over for the other to do the same: Esther. The columns move off in opposite directions.
It is a powerful image. Had the book jacket not made clear that this was to be the story of two women, it would have come as a surprise. For the first 200 pages have their own shape: the story of Esther's childhood in the French Alpes Maritimes, her narrow escape from the encroaching Holocaust, and her clandestine postwar emigration to Israel. Now Le Clezio counterposes another story, one dominated by deprivation and horror instead of youth and light, though both centered around attractive and resilient young women. But anybody trying to predict the course of the book at this stage would still be wrong.
The only other book by the 2008 Nobel laureate that I have read, ONITSHA, despite its almost mythical African setting, shows similar qualities to this one: adolescent protagonists, life-altering journeys, the mystique of an absent father, the search for home -- and above all the interplay of contrasting narratives. WANDERING STAR is constantly shifting between genres. It opens in radiant simplicity, a tale of growing-up almost like a young adult novel, but it unfolds with curious repetitions, in whorls and petals, at times becoming more a dream than a story. As the Italians withdraw from that part of France and the Germans move in, we move to another familiar trope, that of the Holocaust novel; but again many of the usual expectations are denied, or postponed only to be fulfilled almost as footnotes many pages later.
Over all of this lies the Exodus story. Esther (then called Helene) is brought up by non-religious parents. There is a striking scene when on a whim she visits the little village synagogue, and the sound of the prayers in a language she doesn't understand becomes for her an all-enveloping light. She gradually begins to experience her own Jewishness, and becomes possessed by the ideal of Eretz Israel and the city of light at its heart. Her journey there will not be easy, but eventually she arrives -- only to have that Exodus story contested by another exodus in the opposite direction.
How will the two narratives be resolved? Can they be resolved? The biblical Exodus led to forty years in the wilderness, forty years of further wandering. The action in WANDERING STAR extends for a similar period and moves to Jordan, Canada, back to France. Readers of ONITSHA will know Le Clezio's penchant for postludes; what he does here is more scattered, more true to life, and possibly more profound. Near the end, Esther revisits her old homes, looking for memories. The old Nazi headquarters has been turned into condos, the torrent that flowed down her village street has become a trickle, the mountain refuge where they once sheltered on their flight is booked up with tourists. But up there among the rocks and grasses she comes to a new realization: that our physical wanderings from place to place are nothing compared to the journeys we make in our minds.
Buy It For Everyone You Know December 29, 2008
Having read some of Le Clezio's earliest work ("The Giants", "War", "Book of Flights", all of which I have also commented upon on Amazon), this book seems like a bit of an anomaly- it is, unlike the aforementioned troika, a sustained narrative written in a limpid, sober, hauntingly spare style. That early triumvirate (now reissued by the good folks at Vintage) is intent on undoing the frayed fabric of fiction, interrogating the repressed political motivations/ramifications of literature as an institution. "Wandering Star", by contrast, is in most respects a rather orthodox novel, save for the somewhat inexplicable shifts between an impersonal, omniscient narrative voice and first-person diary accounts. All of this, I suppose, can be attributed to the decades that separate said works- one can, by comparison, think of the trajectory that Foucault's career would assume with age (from the irreverent stylistic gymnastics of "Order of Things" to the austere, worldly-wise calm of "Care Of The Self").
Such surprises aside, I can, without reservation, affirm that "Wandering Star" is a tremendous feat. While being extraordinarily readable (I would imagine that most readers would be able to finish the novel in two sittings, if not one), it is incredibly suggestive and deeply compassionate, without being maudlin or overwrought. Access to a box of tissues is advised while you read this novel- there are moments of tremendous beauty and sadness. Beyond this, the sheer sensuality of the prose is comparable to the very best of Whitman, early Rimbaud, Camus (the texture and ambience of Esther's sunbaked narrative reminds me very much of "The First Man", Nejma's harrowing half invokes memories of "The Plague"), Gide, Lawrence, Li Bai and Lucretius. I have always felt that Le Clezio is, above all else, a feral, visceral sort of writer- even his earliest works, for all their formal brilliance, structural invention and lexical pyrotechnics, are suffused with a deep, vitalistic affirmation of the sensual world. Le Clezio's sympathies are largely with the corporeal and the tactile, as opposed to the cerebral. This unflinching love of life has assumed various names throughout the history of Western letters- for Spinoza it was the "Conatus", for Blake, "energy", for Nietzsche, the "Will To Power", for Deleuze it was "desire", for Hamsun and Le Clezio it is "hunger", that indestructible, insatiable lust for life that cannot be repressed by any sort of tyranny. It is within the pages of "Wandering Star" that the living pulse beneath all of Le Clezio's novels throbs loudest.
Yet,there is something else that distinguishes "Wandering Star", and Le Clezio's work at large, from the morass of postmodernist muck. Le Clezio is insistent that literature is never an insular, private affair, a hermetic cabal restricted to a privileged few. Literature is always a collective enunciation, storytelling is communal: "That's why Sadi Abou Talib, the Baddawi, the man who would later become my husband and who did not know how to read or write, having learned that I'd been to school in al-Jazzar, asked me to describe everything that we endure in the Nour Chams Camp, so that the world would know, nd no-one would ever forget." (207)..."She sat down in the doorway to our shack, facing outward, not wearing a veil, because she wasn't telling the story just for me." (213)Le Clezio, like all great artists, is keenly aware of the power of fabulation and its centrality to human experience. It is through stories that we herald the dawn, that we proclaim the advent of hope.
Literature at its finest! Good to see it getting the attention it deserves! October 10, 2008
23 out of 24 found this review helpful
I read this book two years ago and was blown away, here was an author I had never heard of writing such a powerful, well written novel. He mixes the mythic with a stark realism that goes from disturbing and depressing to an uplifting narrative of the strength of the human spirit. A best selling author in France, Le Clezio has not been well known in the States, so I was pleased to see this book listed in Amazon's top 100 bestsellers. Buy and read this book, you will be touched and it will stay with long after you turn the last page. Speaking of literature that deserves better know do check out "Misfits Country."
Novel on struggles and hopes of refugees September 28, 2004
38 out of 43 found this review helpful
The "wandering stars" are two young girls, each trying to escape from an oppressive, threatening condition. Esther is a Jewish girl who escapes from Nazi-occupied Europe to Israel. Nejma lives in a Palestinian refugee camp. The two girls' lives are not intertwined physically, but rather spiritually in how they both deal with similar feelings of fear, helplessness, and desire for a better life. Le Clezio, a French author of 20 novels, goes beyond politics, cultural differences, and historical moments to cast light on the universal feelings in experiences of suffering and the struggles, desires, and dreams growing out of such experiences.
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