2024 BOOK REVIEW #21: AVERS BY J.M.G LE CLEZIO

With Avers, the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature J.M.G Le Clezio returns to depicting the “undesirables” of this world in tune with nature but taken down by geopolitical forces.

He was one of my first favorite writers, with a recurrent poetry of the dispossessed and those marching to their own drums, so much so, that I wanted to go to Nice where he grew up to study French literature myself, where he had done so as well.

My parents, not wanting me to be that free, instead guided me to a journalism degree in English at Concordia University in Montreal, closer to their Washington D.C., base at the time, setting me on an entirely different path.

I used to write much more in French, my first language, and this separation of my brain and different personalities has always torn at me, not knowing exactly what I am doing in English.

I did find out I much prefer to write about what is, and don’t have the wherewithal to be a novelist creating new worlds, or at least have not tried, still utterly fascinated by the human condition around me.

The first story in this Le Clezio collection is about a young girl rejected by both her abusive stepparents and a Catholic convent in Madagascar after her beloved fisherman father died at sea. She then finds a beautiful voice to sing through the pain, and always remains steadfastedly on her own terms, whatever the consequences.

The heroes of the other stories are often kids who like her spend time unsheltered after being forced to flee their homes, due to family trauma, industrialists, drug traffickers or war, from Peru to Colombia, Lebanon and the author’s native islands of Mauritius. In one the eight stories, teenagers go between the United States and Mexico in underground gutters, trying to find their way out of the deepest holes.

It’s a book about injustice, and too many of us ignoring the daily lives of this next generation, caught on the wrong side in a world of too few winners and way too many losers, through no fault of their own but ours.

As a journalist, from Indonesia to West Africa, with stops in Brazil and France, to my current base in Reno, Nevada, I've tried as best as I've could to share some these stories as well, hoping it can help us be better perhaps collectively.