KEY POINTS:
Do literature and history secretly march in step? Believers in some deep organic link between the arts and the society surrounding them could be forgiven for thinking so.
In the week that a once-almighty model of "Anglo-Saxon" financial power came crashing to the ground, the Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to a cosmopolitan French-language writer with a deep green sensibility, Third World affiliations and a lifelong bias to the marginal and poor.
The choice of Jean-Marie Le Clezio has merit on its own terms - as well as somehow looking like the topical reflection of a hunger for a world that spreads its benefits beyond a now-disgraced elite. True, the Academy's citation did praise the Nice-born author, who comes from a Breton family long settled on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, as the "explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".
To a background music of crumbling banks and sinking economies, that sounds like an endorsement of a prolific body of work that lines up with the wretched of the earth against the arrogance of the exploiting West.
Le Clezio's writing does tilt in that direction, but its lyrical and mystical power - in novels such as Desert, The Gold Prospector and Onitsha - lifts it far beyond polemic.
Although he began as a Camus-style existentialist with his 1963 novel The Interrogation, his far-sighted concerns with ecology, migration and global justice had come to the fore by about 1970, in books such as Terra Amata and The Book of Flights. Above all, Le Clezio is a traveller in body and spirit: a citizen of the world who identifies his homeland as the French language rather than French society.
The work of his that I know - a small fraction of the copious whole - reminds me of figures such as Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri or even, sometimes, Bruce Chatwin: haunted landscapes, harsh, hidden lives in beautiful but accursed places and perilous voyages across hallucinatory scenes of miracle and terror.
He names his own favourite novelists as Stevenson and Joyce: despite their disparities, both authors who could always see the dangerous wonders of the world through a child's eye.
- INDEPENDENT
