Wandering Star

This was the first book that I had read by Le Clézio and I was impressed. The novel features outstanding prose and a page turning story. Those elements are the central attractions for this beautifully written novel. It was written in French and translated by C. Dickson. Every page seems to bring some sort of literary delight. The prose and the descriptions of nature remind one of Hemingway in the opening pages of Farewell to Arms, or George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. But unlike those classics where much of the memorable prose is at the start of the novel, the wonderful prose goes on and on like Flaubert but lighter. "It was as if there had never been a summer before that one. The sun scorched the grasses in the fields, the stones in the torrent, and the mountain seemed so distant against the dark blue sky. Esther often walked down to the river, deep in the valley, ..." Most will want to read the book, put it aside, and read it again later. The opening chapters are wonderfully well written and the character Esther, who is the wandering star, is fascinating. She is a young Jewish girl caught up in the ethnic cleansing of World War II, who tries to escape and make her way to Israel. As one reads the novel it seems perfect. However, the perfection seems somewhat diminished in the second half. Mainly, the story speeds up as we jump ahead in time, jumping decades near the end of the book. It starts to run a bit too fast for me. Overall, the story seems too short and as we near the end, the spell of a perfect novel is lost. Most of the novel is about the character Esther, who is the primary character. The second character is introduced in the middle of the book. The story of the second character, is about Nejma, also a young woman, a Palestinian in a refugee camp. Her story is neither as long nor as detailed as Esther's. Also, there is a lack of closure in the stories, and a lack of interconnection between their lives. The two meet only once, and briefly. This creates a missing element in the mind of the reader. One assumes that the author is attempting to show to young women in parallel stressful situations, to make a point about the development of Israel - and life in general. He accomplishes those goals very effectively. Putting aside the plot aesthetics, this is a compelling read that I could not put down and I read it in a day. Most will love the novel. 5 stars and a must read.

As Hélène, as her father insisted on calling her, Esther had enjoyed a relatively cheerful and innocent childhood. In 1943, she and her parents find safety in a remote mountain region of Southern France, having fled the German army. The small town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie has turned into a collection point for Jewish and other refugees, eyed with some suspicion by the local population. However, the reprieve is short lived and the fugitives have to flee again... Spanning some forty years of her life, Esther's story is that of a "wandering star", searching for safety and inner peace. Among the multitude of fictional Holocaust survival stories, Le Clézio's engrossing and superbly written 1992 novel stands out in a number of ways. His insightful portrayal of the heroine, Hélène/Esther, vividly evoked in part through her own voice, captures different, essential stages of her life and is as realistic as it is deeply moving. Esther's astute observation of her surroundings reflects the author's extraordinary talent to convey landscapes in their rich diversity and splendour, often emphasizing the discrepancy between them and the desolate reality of the people who move through them (*). A good example here is the description of the long exhaustive trek over rugged mountain terrain that the refugees have to take to reach the relative safety of Italy. The heart-wrenching struggle of the fugitives, weakened by hunger and anxiety, stands in stark contrast to young girl's awe of the natural environment's exceptional beauty. Esther, having been brought up by secular parents, is increasingly drawn to the Jewish faith with its rituals, the powerful sounds of the "foreign" language and her hope for clarity in her own identity. Eventually, after a period of more dramatic journeys, her yearning for Eretz Israel turns into reality. The ship with the refugees lands as the State of Israel is being declared. Having left the duality of her name behind, a new duality comes to the fore: the anticipation and excitement for the new and anticipated happiness and the deep sorrow for what she had to leave behind. At this point, Le Clézio introduces a new complexity into the narrative. As a counterpart to Esther, the author presents Nejma, a Palestinian girl of Esther's age. The two pass each other on the mountain road towards/away from Jerusalem. They have only time to step out of their respective stream of refugees, touch and share their names. It is a powerful image: their lives moving in opposite directions - one full of hope for the realization of her dream, the other filled with confusion and anxiety, walking into uncertainty having been expelled from her traditional home. Will their lives intersect again? Nejma's journal, while shorter and more compacted than Esther's personal story, is in no way less powerful. In fact, it gives the author the means for touching in a very subtle way on a range of personal and societal challenges faced by Israelis and Palestinians al

I understand that this is a translation and, don't get me wrong, no complaints about this powerful story but, come on, where's the proofreader? This man won the Nobel prize for literature and every five pages I'd find another typo. A little annoying for such a great writer.

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 Clézio 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 Hélène) 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 Clézio's penchant f