Savoring a Book--The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts

You may have noted that excerpts and notes from J. M. G. Le Clézio are rather few and far between.  And this is exceedingly unusual for me because the book is on loan from the library.  But I don't notice a grasping hoard of people wretchedly unhappy for lack of it--and I would like to see that change.  So, those who do not have a copy, read and weep for your deprivation!

from "Villa Aurora"

in The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts
J. M. G. Le Clézio

Later on, along with other mischief makers, I learned how to enter that domain through a breach in the old wall, over by the gully on the shady side of the hill.  but in those days we no longer talked of the lady of Villa Aurora or even of Villa Aurora itself. We spoke of them in periphrases that we had undoubtedly invented for purposes of exorcising the mystery of early childhood and justifying our trespassing; we would call it "going to the stray cats' garden" or elese "going through the hole in the wall." But we were careful to stay in the wild part of the garden, the part where the cats lived, with their miraculous litters of blind kittens, and two or three plaster statues had been given over to the vegetation. During those games of hide-and-seek and reconnaissance expeditions through the jungle of acanthus and bay laurels, very rarely did I glimpse, remote and dreamlike, surrounded by the trunks of palms, the great white house with its fan-shaped stairway. And never once did I hear the voice of the mistress; never once did I see her on the stairs or on the gravel path or even in a window.

The rolling accumulation of detail continues, the language fans ebbs and flows in a powerful cyclic way creating once again the hypnotic atmosphere in an environment not so catastrophically claustrophobic, agoraphobic, or just plain phobic as in the other stories. I'm not blind to the awkwardness of the translation (or the original here), but I am entranced by the utter command of this peculiar syntactical and descriptive world that M. Le Clézio creates for us.  Beautiful.  I'll have to get it in French to really experience it.