Let me start with something that may seem anecdotal, but maybe not so much. Love in France, volume of stories by J.M.G. Le Clézio is not called that in the original edition. The title in French is Avers, taken from the first story, Anverso in Spanish. But the Spanish edition has chosen to use the title of another narration of the book.
I assume that this has been done with the approval of the author, because you do not give a Nobel Prize winner a change of this caliber without prior consultation. And I also assume that the new title was chosen because it has more hook than the original aseptic one. But beyond trying to seduce the potential reader, the tradeoff can mislead them.
France is just one of the many settings in this work whose geography is the world: Panama, Mauritius, Mexico, Peru, Lebanon... And the most surprising thing is the total disappearance in the Spanish edition of the subtitle that appears clearly on the Gallimard cover. : Des nouvelles des indésirables, that is, Stories about the undesirables. The omission of it is not trivial, because this subtitle precisely delimits the author's playing field and is the thread that sews all the texts together, giving a unitary meaning to the whole.
Love in France brings together eight stories of diverse lengths and origins, some already published in magazines or written on request. However, it is not a mere compilation of various short pieces as a catch-all. The book has a coherence, a unitary meaning, because all the stories give voice to those undesirables mentioned in the subtitle of the French edition, to the invisible, to the marginalized, to the disinherited, to the outcasts of the Earth.
Among these undesirables, the most innocent victims stand out: the children and adolescents who star in the most solid stories in the volume. Like Maureez, the girl from Rodrigues Island in Mauritius, who in Anverso flees the abuse of her stepfather and finds redemption and a possible future in music. Or like Chuche, another teenager, this Latin American, who in Camino Luminous escapes from a camp of children enslaved by the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla; She is pregnant and takes a disabled child with her as she flees.
Or like Hanné's two children, who undertake a journey through a Lebanon at war, full of soldiers that they have always seen as part of the landscape. Or like the kids on the street of Nogales, in the border area between Mexico and the United States, who star in La pichancha.
And then there is Yoni, who returns to the jungle of his ancestors in Panama and whose story is told to us by a narrator who is around collecting information on medicinal plants for the Smithsonian and tells us: “Yoni had never known anything like it, a place without men.” , without intelligence, from which words and thoughts had disappeared, where only sensations, smells, touch, murmurs remained. The jungle captured, buried, drowned.”
Le Clézio also gives visibility to migrants in Love in France and Ghosts in the Street. And he evokes, in the story titled The Taniers River, the world of childhood through the lullabies sung by the nursemaid of the grandfather of a family from Mauritius that eventually dispersed throughout France. For the narrator, these lullabies represent a lost world, perhaps a paradise, symbolized by the river of the title, which no longer exists because it dried up.
The topics that Le Clézio addresses are fertile ground for demagoguery and sentimentality. But the author is neither a corny nor a pamphleteer with easy verbiage, but rather a wandering writer, who has traveled the five continents and known realities that are not always comfortable. He reflects them with a transparent, refined language that is not entangled in flourishes. The narrator of one of the stories asks: “What's the point of inventing characters and stories? Isn't life enough? (…) I don't know what art is, I know that love is the only thing worthy of being eternal.”
J.M.G. In the Clézio. Love in France. Lumen Translation by M. T. Gallego Urrutia and A. Garcia Gallego 204 pages 18.90 euros
