| Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:00AM | | | | Le Clezio and Adam Gopnik | Posted By: Mary Ann Caws
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| Tags: Le Clezio, Creolization, spam, New Mexico, landscape, language as life | Pen pointed out that we are celebrating World Voices while the rest of the world is putting up its hands in defeat... So this is the celebration. Nice to hear Le Clezio speaking of looking out his window in Albuquerque and seeing tumbleweed: that's very delightful, since when we look out of OUR window we see other buildings. And just as nice to hear about where his family has settled, that "we are nearly everywhere."
Creolization, he says, is a great thing, since it means adaptation to new ways of life... He remembers begging the GI's for food, having subsisted on roots, and being given Spam, chewing gum, and white bread.
As for belonging now, where he really belongs is books: which, of course, felt true for his audience tonight. "Language was my real life." Dictionaries his favorite books, Salinger one of his favorite authors: "Reading Salinger, I am Holden Caulfield." How we all learn, reading-Frankenstein, that we have something monstrous in us. -
Your work, said Adam Gopnik could be seen as a series of escapes. Yes, agreed Le Clezio, and literature is the contrary of affirmation: you can't know. Camus, therefore, who is also the contrary of affirming, and showed -- thus, we are for him -- his kind of weakness in his Nobel address (the issue of the Algerian War and his mother, his choice that we used to quote on every teaching occasion, as many of us remember.) Ah, reading Camus under the olive tree outside: plein air reading and writing. But, he said later, that was then, and now he works inside. (Back to the tumbleweed.) Actually, to read outside in Paris or London, you'd have to do it under an umbrella, he said -- for someone living some of her life in Provence, as I do, this remark seemed just right.
The way Nathalie Sarraute capture the specific time in l'Ere du soupcon...but the new breath brought by Glissant, Chamoiseau, Cesaire...
His not crossing to Israel from Jordan, when the border was closed: the audience laughed.
One question from the audience seemed to me both curious and brave: it was also unanswerable: "How would you describe the landscape of your mind?" Indeed. | | | |
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opening of festival
listening to voices
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