Le ClÉZIO, J.M.G. 1940-

(Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio)

PERSONAL: Born April 13, 1940, in Nice, France; son of Raoul (a medical officer) and Simone Le Clézio; married Rosalie Piquemal, January 23, 1961; children: Patricia, Amy. Education: Attended Bristol University, 1958–59, and London University, 1960–61; University of Nice, licence-es-lettres, 1959–63; University of Aixen-Provence, M.A., 1964; University of Peripignan, docteur-es-lettres, 1983. Hobbies and other interests: Drawing.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., Willimantic, CT 06226.

CAREER: Buddhist University, Bangkok, Thailand, teacher, 1966–67; University of Mexico, Mexico City, teacher, 1967; writer, 1967–. Visiting professor at Boston University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of New Mexico.

AWARDS, HONORS: Prix Theophraste Renaudot, 1963, for Le Proces-verbal; Prix Valery Larbaud from Bibliotheque Municipale Valery Larbaud, 1972; Paul Morand literary prize from Academie Francaise, 1980.

WRITINGS:

Le Proces-verbal (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1963, translation by Daphne Woodward published as The Interrogation, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1964.

Le Jour ou Beaumont fit connaissance avec sa douleur (short story; title means "The Day That Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain"; included in La Fievre [also see below]), Mercure de France (Paris, France), 1964.

(Author of preface) Flannery O'Connor, Et ce sont les violents qui L'emportent (novella; originally published in English as The Violent Bear It Away), translation by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1965.

La Fievre (short stories; includes "Le Jour ou Beaumont fit connaissance avec sa douleur" [also see above], "Il me semble que le bateau se dirige vers l'ile," "Arrière," "L'Homme qui marche," "Martin," and "Le Monde est vivant"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1965, translation by Daphne Woodward published as Fever, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1966.

Le Deluge (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1966, translation by Peter Green published as The Flood, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1968.

(Contributor) Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Arc, introduction by Bernard Pingaud, [Paris], 1966.

L'Extase materielle (essay; title means "The Ecstasy of Matter"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1967.

Terra Amata (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1967, translation by Barbara Bray published as Beloved Earth, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969.

Le Livre des fuites: Roman d'adventures (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1969, translation by Simon Watson Taylor published as The Book of Flights: An Adventure Story, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1972.

La Guerre (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1970, translation by Simon Watson Taylor published as War, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1973.

Hai (essay), Skira, 1971.

Mydriase (essay; title means "Mydriasis"), Fata Morgana, 1973.

(Author of preface) Isidore Ducasse, Oeuvres completes: Les Chants de Maldoror, Lettres, Poesies I et II, edited by Hubert Juin, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1973.

Les Géants (novel), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1973, translation by Simon Watson Taylor published as The Giants, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1975.

Voyages de L'autre Côte (novel; title means "Journeys to the Other Side"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1975.

(Translator from Mayan and author of preface) Les Propheties du Chilam Balam (title means "The Prophecies of Chilam Balam"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1976.

L'Inconnu sur la terre (stories; title means "The Unknown One on the Earth"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1978.

Mondo et autres histoires (short stories; title means "Mondo and Other Stories"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1978.

Vers les icebergs (essay; title means "Towards the Icebergs"), Fata Morgana, 1978.

Voyage au pays des arbres (children's story; title means "A Journey to the Land of Trees", illustrations by Henri Galeron, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1978.

Trois Villes saintes (meditations; title means "Three Holy Cities"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1980.

Desert (novel; title means "Desert"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1980.

La Ronde et autres faits divers (short stories; contains "La Ronde," "Moloch," "L'Echappe," "Ariane," "Villa Aurore," "Le Jeu d'Anne," "La Grande Vie," "Le Passeur," "O voleur, voleur, quel vie est la tienne?," "Orlamonde," and "David"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1982, translation by C. Dickson published as The Round: And Other Cold Hard Facts, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.

(Author of preface) Max Jacob, Dernier Poemes en vers et en prose, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1982.

(Translator from Spanish and author of preface) Relations des ceremonies, des rites, du peuple et du gouvernement des Indiens de la province de Mechuacan, 1541 (nonfiction), Collection Tradition, 1984.

Le Chercheur d'or (novel; title means "The Gold-Seeker"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1985.

Voyage à Rodrigues (journal), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1986.

Les Années Cannes: 40 Ans de festival (nonfiction; title means "The Cannes Years: Forty Years of Festivals"), Hatier, 1987.

Le Reve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue (essays; title means "The Mexican Dream, or Thought Interrupted"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1989.

The Prospector, translated from French by Carol Marks, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1993.

La quarantaine (novel; title means "The Quarantine," Gallimard (Paris, France), 1995.

In the Eye of the Sun: Mexican Fiestas, introduction by Richard Rodriguez, photographs by Geoff Winningham, Norton (New York, NY), 1997.

Onitsha, translated by Alison Anderson, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1997.

La Fête Chantée, et Autres Essais de Theme Amerindien, Le Promeneur, 1997.

Poisson d'or: Roman, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1997.

(With wife, Jemia Le Clézio) Gens des nuages, with photographs by Bruno Barbey, Stock (Paris, France), 1997.

Hasard; Suivi de, Angoli Mala: Romans, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1999.

Coeur brûle et autres romances, Gallimard (Paris, France), 2000.

Révolutions: Roman, Gallimard (Paris, France), 2003.

L'Africain, Mercure de France (Paris, France), 2004.

Étoile errant (novel), translation by C. Dickson published as The Wandering Star, Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), 2004.

Also author of Diego et Frida, 1993. Several of Le Clézio's short stories have been published for children in Gallimard's "Folio Junior" series, including "Lullaby," 1980, "Celui qui n'avait jamais vu la mer, suivi de La Montagne du dieu vivant" (title means "He Who Has Never Seen the Sea followed by Mountain of the Living God"), 1984, and "Villa Aurore suivi de Orlamonde," 1985.

SIDELIGHTS: J.M.G. Le Clézio is one of France's premier contemporary authors. Many of the works in his large body of writing, which includes novels, short stories, essays, and collections of personal meditations, have been bestsellers in that country, and many of his books have been translated into English and other languages. Le Clézio's fiction frequently takes on experimental forms and explores major metaphysical questions, examining the nature of language as it portrays and creates reality.

Le Clézio's canon is frequently characterized, in the words of Emile J. Talbot in World Literature Today, as a "continuing reflection on the alienating forces of the post-industrial world." Themes of the barrenness of modern existence and escape from the tyrannies of urban industrialized civilization permeate most of his writing, in which unstable narrative points of view and surrealistic sequences describing sensory perception in extreme detail frequently replace traditional psychological character development and plot. Stephen Smith, however, noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that while Le Clézio's early protagonists are often victims who experience the futility of man's struggle against a brutal, indifferent world, his later heroes "pursue [their dreams] rather than submitting to fate," and thereby achieve "a mature sense of satisfaction and understanding."

Le Clézio is sometimes considered to have been influenced by existentialist philosophy and by writers of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel), a genre in which unconventional narrative techniques emphasize objective perception of reality over subjective interpretation. Critics, however, generally do not classify the author as belonging exclusively to any specific movement in modern French literature. "If there is a single dominant characteristic of Le Clézio's style," asserted Smith, "it is his enthusiastic espousal of an aesthetics of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, decidedly not in an effort to reconcile them into a synthesis, but rather, it seems, for the sheer love of the beauty of their dialectical tension, or perhaps from a vision of reality so broad that all exclusions must count as falsehoods."

At age twenty-three Le Clézio won the prestigious Prix Theophraste Renaudot for his first novel, Le Proces-verbal, translated as The Interrogation. The work is an account of the experiences of Adam Pollo, who, like many of Le Clézio's early characters, is an archetypal human figure. The protagonist has broken his social ties and spends most of the novel wandering aimlessly around a city identified by some critics as Le Clézio's native Nice, France. There he experiences, as described by Peter Brooks in the Partisan Review, "a life of immediate, primitive, preverbal contact with objects, a life of non-egoism and pure being." The narrative is an interior monologue that shifts between first and third person points of view and is interrupted by some diary entries and several dialogues between Pollo and a woman with whom he has a brief, emotionless affair. The book portrays Pollo's physical sensations and mental perceptions while, among other actions, he seduces the woman, kills a rat, yells insults at a group of people gathered in a street, and finally gets arrested for an unspecified act of self-exposure after which he is placed in an asylum. When psychiatrists question him, Pollo begins to explain himself, but his attempts at communication fail, and the novel ends with the doctor's written clinical diagnosis.

Critics praised Le Proces-verbal's perspective centered on a man's interaction with the physical environment. Brooks, for example, wrote: "Le Clézio takes as an initial premise the need to renew our perception of the world, to view phenomena from a new and starkly nonlogical, noncausative standpoint." "What is most admirable about The Interrogation," the critic continued, "is its effort to situate the reader in a universe dense with sensations precisely and literally evoked, and to prevent his drawing the normal conclusions from them." But other critics, while acknowledging Le Clézio's talent, found his attempt to mythologize human sensory experience apart from social or cultural involvement neither new nor valuable. Stanley Kauffmann expressed such a view in the New York Review of Books, stating that Le Proces-verbal is "insufficiently relevant to large concerns, a youthful paw at the universe instead of the intended tragic embrace."

Le Clézio's preoccupation with sensation and perception continued in La Fievre, his first collection of short stories, translated as Fever in 1968. Page Stegner in the New York Times Book Review appreciated the author's description—"nine tales of little madness"—for the stories, but the reviewer noted that they could be more precisely characterized as "renderings of … a variety of sensations (fever, pain, fatigue, etc.) … and of the ability of these sensations to transport the mind into ecstatic states of hyper-consciousness." The most famous piece in the collection, "Le Jour ou Beaumont fit connaissance avec sa douleur" ("The Day That Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain"), explores how a man's extreme awareness of his agonizing toothache brings about a merging of physical pain and psychological suffering that comes to dominate his entire consciousness. Stegner was also impressed with what he described as Le Clézio's "skill in manipulating language and … his ability to create with words vividly impressionistic paintings."

Other reviewers concentrated on identifying the literary sources of Le Clézio's ideas. Discussing La Fievre in the New York Review of Books, John Weightman commented on what he saw as the influence of French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, comparing Le Clézio's notion of "fever" to Sartre's "nausea," a spiritual sickness that arises from contemplating life devoid of meaning. The critic also noted that the work's almost exclusive concern with the mind's inability to be conscious of the thinking process as it occurs invites comparison to French writers of the New Novel, such as Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. "Le Clézio is so convinced that the drama of the consciousness's relationship with itself is the central problem for the writer," Weightman declared, "that he looks upon the traditional literary genres as out-of-date devices corresponding to mistaken concepts."

Le Clézio returns to the city as the setting of his 1966 novel, Le Deluge. Translated as The Flood, the work opens with a forty-five page surrealistic portrayal of the earth that has become, as cited from the novel by a reviewer in Time magazine, "a deserted planet, full of signs and booby traps." The novel's action then begins with the interior dialogue of its main character, Francois Besson, who, like Le Proces-verbal's archetypal Adam Pollo, detaches himself from his social roles and responsibilities and becomes the victim of his own estrangement. In a series of seemingly unrelated events, former teacher Besson returns to his boyhood home, listens to a tape recording made and sent to him by his suicidal ex-girlfriend, burns his belongings, and commences wandering the streets, where he begs, meditates, and eventually murders a complete stranger. Finally, Besson takes a bus to the seashore, lies down on the beach, and, in an extreme gesture of hopelessness and renunciation, blinds himself by staring directly at the sun. Throughout the novel an intermittent rain and the dull murmur of rising flood waters that will inevitably engulf the city echo the character's increasingly disturbed and hallucinatory state of mind.

Le Clézio presents Besson's perceptions and sensations against the detailed rendering of a contemporary cityscape. Numerous descriptions of ordinary objects, such as pinball machines, motorcycles, and cigarette butts, together characterize the pointless insanity of life in a society where man-made objects and structures have gained control over human perceptions and responses. As summarized by the Time reviewer, Le Clézio demonstrates how "man lives simultaneously in an ugly asphalt jungle … and [in] an increasingly demented and purposeless state of mind." Several critics noted, however, that despite his focus on despair and alienation, the author nevertheless projects intense emotion that strengthens the impact of his fiction. Reviewer John Wain, for example, wrote in the New Republic that Le Clézio "is not infected with the curious heartlessness that seems endemic among modern French writers; one senses compassion, even grief, behind his endless catalogues and his parade of the evidences of futility. Indeed, he is well aware that what he is describing is not human life … but hell." Eliot Fremont-Smith in the New York Times commented: "This is not an easy book, and certainly not conventionally pleasant; but it is done with such force, intelligence and exactness, and a kind of swelling compassion, that its effect is all but overwhelming."

Le Clézio's concern for humankind's nightmarish plight resurfaces in the novels La Guerre (translated as War) and Les Géants (translated as The Giants), both published in the early 1970s. Each novel was acclaimed for its descriptions of its urban setting. La Guerre again juxtaposes an interior monologue with starkly objective, disjointed impressions of the environment to depict, on one level, a young girl's journey through a war-ravaged world.

Les Géants, a story set in an urban department store called Hyperpolis, dramatizes the corruption of human language, communication, art, and spirit by modern advertising, capitalism, and technology. The novel's symbolic main characters named Tranquilite, Machines, and Bogo the Mute again portray the victimization of mankind by its own civilization. Unlike Le Clézio's earlier novels, however, Les Géants ends with the possibility of transcendence over the ills of modernity, a theme that recurs in several of the author's subsequent works.

The expansive Terra Amata, published in 1967 (translated as Beloved Earth, in 1969), is perhaps Le Clézio's most experimental work. The novel portrays several incidents, from birth to death, in the life of Chancelade, another allegorical main character. Le Clézio introduces him as a young boy, indifferently pretending to be God, reigning over a swarm of potato bugs. Chancelade moves through milestones such as his first sexual encounter, marriage, the death of his father, fatherhood, and death—episodes that serve as analogies, according to Washington Post Book World reviewer Geoffrey Wolff, to "man's genesis, flowering, erosion and destruction." Le Clézio further extends Terra Amata's scope by experimenting with unconventional forms of language. He includes in the text lists of names, a poem in Polish, advertisements, discussions of archaeological findings, Morse code, a table of contents that does not appear until the penultimate chapter, and prose descriptions of sign language for the deaf. The author also frequently calls attention to his own fiction-making process, ending the story with comments on the artificiality of the book.

Terra Amata elicited widely differing critical responses. A writer for Time magazine felt the book to be overblown and deemed the work and others like it "the literary bleating of the young in which the gyrations of the ephemeral self and the monumental turnings of the solar system get dizzily confused." New York Times correspondent Thomas Lask panned the book as "adolescent outpourings" that "sound like cries of woe between bites of eclair." "Sure life is bitter, brutish, short," the critic complained, "[but] it needs no simpering hero come from France to tell us this." Other critics, however, admired Terra Amata's breadth. Books Abroad contributor Germaine Bree, for instance, commended the "immense passion" with which Le Clézio depicts "the incessant voice of the world, which, in dream, imagination, and perception, invades, encircles, terrifies, and exalts." Wolff also praised the book, asserting that Terra Amata "is both fastidiously intelligent and moving, [and] in form highly disciplined." The critic admired Le Clézio's "astonishing ambition" in his "portrayal of the beginning and end of life," applauding the author's success in presenting a universal perspective that shows how "man vanishes [and] the earth endures, its surface scarcely scratched by our comings and goings."

In his later works Le Clézio increasingly focuses on the idea of escape from the omnipresent limitations of society, a theme especially prevalent in two volumes of short stories titled Mondo et autres histoires and La Ronde et autres faits divers. Moving away from the obvious allegory present in his earlier fiction, Le Clézio populates the tales in Mondo with ordinary children. In several stories, youngsters attempt to escape the constraints of life inherent in civilization—constraints, according to Emile J. Talbot in World Literature Today, perpetuated by mandatory formal education. In two of the tales, children run away from school; in all of them, children venture into the mountains or unspoiled areas and form exuberant, almost mystical relationships with nature or with unsophisticated country children who appreciate the wilderness and struggle against its hardships. Although most of the children are eventually forced to return to their original environments, their newly found "intimacy with the universe," Talbot asserted, "has provided these young people with their salvation,… and their reintegration into the world of men can never be complete."

According to some critics, La Ronde et autres faits divers, published in America as The Round: And Other Cold Hard Facts, complements Mondo's sense of joyful release and optimism with defeat and frustration and marks Le Clézio's return to themes of futility and victimization. The stories in La Ronde revolve around realistically rendered individuals such as laborers, illegal aliens, poverty-stricken children, and immigrants who desperately turn to crime or ill-conceived adventures in order to escape their harsh urban environments. Faits divers, explained Talbot, are "minor news items"—instances of crime and misery reported in the back pages of a newspaper, dismissed by society, and unimportant to all but those who experience them. A teenaged girl is raped in a poor housing development, an immigrant father resorts to theft to feed his family, and a woman gives birth unassisted in squalor and terror. Talbot pointed out that the significant motif in the collection is cement—Le Clézio's recurrent symbol of the dehumanization that characterizes modern life. A Kirkus Reviews critic found the stories in The Round "brilliantly written" and praised the way the tales "illuminate a world of the underprivileged and outcast."

Desert, published in 1980, again continues Le Clézio's affirmation of the freedom that he believes lies outside modern civilization. Comprised of two narratives, it depicts the heroic struggle and ultimate massacre of a group of North African desert nomads at the hands of early twentieth-century French colonialists and, seventy years later, the decision of one of the tribe's descendants to leave her life as a famous model to regain the freedom, pride, and strength she had derived from her homeland. She eventually returns to her native slum village on the desert's edge. Talbot commended Desert as "lexically rich in its evocation of nomadic and desert life," and described the work as "a poetic inquiry into man's relationship with the cosmos." After the novel's release Le Clézio was named the first recipient of the Paul Morand literary prize.

Le Clézio extended his lyrical explorations of man's harmony with the natural environment in the 1985 novel Le Chercheur d'or (title means "The Gold-Seeker"). The story of a man's quest for hidden treasure on Rodrigues island after his father's death and the subsequent loss of his family's fortune. Alexis l'Etang learns the meaning of life and happiness during his long voyage and his many adventures. The novel, which exhibits several mythological themes, is based on the experiences of Le Clézio's paternal grandfather. Some critics faulted what they saw as the book's simplistic moral stance and some admired the strength of its sensual descriptions. A year later, Le Clézio published a journal, Voyage à Rodrigues, his autobiographical account of the actual history behind the Le Chercheur d'or as well as of his visit to the island where the action in the novel takes place. According to Smith, the journal is considered a masterpiece of the genre and earned comparisons to such travel classics as Michel Leiris's L'Afrique fantome and Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques.

In 1995 Le Clézio published La quarantaine, another novel based loosely on the experiences of his own family. The story details how a pair of brothers, Jacques and Leon, attempt to return to Mauritius, the island of their birth, after having been educated in France and England. Authorities will not allow their boat to dock in Mauritius, however, and the brothers find themselves quarantined on Flat Island, a desolate way station rife with disease and death. Despite his surroundings, Leon falls in love with an Indian girl also entrapped on the island, and when an opportunity arises for Leon to leave, he chooses to stay with his lover, even in those conditions. "This wide-ranging, multifaceted novel, a 'Himalaya litteraire' (one not always easy to scale!) confirms [Le Clézio's] reputation as an outstanding writer of his generation," observed John L. Brown in World Literature Today. According to a reviewer for the Economist, La quarantaine confirms Le Clézio's place as "one of the dominant figures of contemporary French fiction."

Onitsha also contains an African setting. The central character, Fintan, travels with his mother to Nigeria, where they both become appalled by the cruelty of the post-World War II colonial environment. Fintan's mother becomes ostracized for her compassion toward native prisoners, eventually forcing the family back to England. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that the novel's sensibility "generates waves that startle and surprise, and that push the reader from one page to the next." To quote Warren Motte in World Literature Today, Le Clézio's main strength "is his ability to catapult his reader into a world that is different from the reader's real world." In Onitsha, Motte suggested, Le Clézio uses his central character's interests in reading to demonstrate "the use of literature as entry into a different world." The reviewer further stated: "In that sense, Onitsha is a book about exile, in which that condition is taken to be universal." In the Library Journal, Faye A. Chadwell promised of Onitsha: "Readers will not forget this novel." A similar sense of exile and displacement informs Wandering Star, in which a young Holocaust survivor makes her way valiantly to Israel, only to meet a Palestinian girl of the same age, recently displaced from her own home.

In addition to fiction writing, Le Clézio has maintained a career-long interest in Central American Indians—including the Mayans and the Porhepechas—and has published several works about their history, art, and civilization. Hai, Trois Villes saintes, Le Reve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue, and La fête chantée et autres essays de theme amerindian are books in which Le Clézio explores his thoughts and feelings about the simplicity and dignity of Indian culture and its survival in contemporary Mexico. These essays and meditations also offer insights into the author's artistic philosophy and serve to illuminate his fictional themes. He has also published translations of ancient Mayan documents. Le Clézio articulates his views on literature and culture in his volume of philosophical essays titled L'Extase materielle and in L'Inconnu sur la terre, a book of poetic short stories.

In The Mexican Dream, Le Clézio discusses Mexico's various Indian tribes and their interrupted evolution by European influences. While the essays provide a "lucidly informative account" of "indigenous thought-systems of the Americas," according to Washington Post Book World critic Dominic Di Bernardi, they downplay less appealing cultural aspects. Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Thomas McGonigle remarked that the essays "suffer rather than benefit by being collected—given a certain repetitiveness and the lack of a central point of view." According to John L. Brown in World Literature Today, La fête chantée describes Le Clézio's months among the Emberas Indians in Panama, during which he was formally adopted into their nation. To quote Brown, it is these experiences with Native Americans that imbues Le Clézio's fiction "with compassionate concern for ethnic minorities." Brown went on to characterize La fête chantée as a "remarkable book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 31, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 83: French Novelists since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1977.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Wandering Star, p. 208.

Books Abroad, summer, 1968, Germaine Bree, review of Terra Amata.

Economist, February 17, 1996, review of La quarantaine, p. S14.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2002, review of The Round: And Other Cold Hard Facts, p. 1793.

Library Journal, April 15, 1997, Faye A. Chadwell, review of Onitsha, p. 118.

New Republic, January 27, 1968, John Wain, review of Le Deluge.

New York Review of Books, January 14, 1965, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Le Proces-verbal; December 1, 1966, John Weightman, review of La Fievre.

New York Times, January 27, 1968, Eliot Fremont-Smith, review of Le Deluge; April 3, 1969, review of Beloved Earth.

New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1968, Page Stegner, review of Fever.

Partisan Review, winter, 1966, Peter Brooks, review of Le Proces-verbal.

Publishers Weekly, March 17, 1997, review of Onitsha, p. 77.

Time, February 9, 1968, review of Le Deluge; April 25, 1969, review of Beloved Earth.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 21, 1993, Thomas McGonigle, review of The Mexican Dream, p. 5.

Washington Post Book World, April 13, 1969, Geoffrey Wolff, review of Beloved Earth; January 2, 1994, Dominic Di Bernardi, review of The Mexican Dream, p. 9.

World Literature Today, winter, 1983, Emile J. Talbot, review of various works; summer, 1993, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, review of Étoile errante, p. 585; fall, 1996, John L. Brown, review of La quarantaine, p. 909; autumn, 1997, Warren Motte, "Writing Away," p. 688; autumn, 1997, Alison Anderson, "Translating J.M.G. LeClézio," p. 694; autumn, 1997, Bettina L. Knapp, "J.M.G. Le Clézio's 'Desert': The Myth of Transparency," p. 703; autumn, 1997, William Thompson, "Voyage and Immobility in J.M.G. Le Clézio's 'Desert' and 'La quarantaine,'" p. 709; autumn, 1997, William Thompson, review of Poisson d'or, p. 748; summer, 1998, John L. Brown, review of La fête chantée et autres essays de theme Amerindian, p. 582; autumn, 1998, Herve Allet, review of Gens des nuages, p. 791; autumn, 2000, Allen Thiher, review of Hasard, suivi de Angoli Mala, p. 840.