Friday, October 10, 2008
Block that metaphor!
There really is nothing like a left-wing newspaper writing about literature. Like, what could this metaphor possibly mean?
The cult French writer JMG Le Clézio yesterday won the Nobel prize for literature, lifting Paris out of its depression over the nation's cultural decline.
Le Clézio, known as France's "nomad novelist", lives mainly in New Mexico in the US, in near seclusion, and is the opposite of Paris's current trend for writers' navel-gazing accounts of their sex lives.
The Swedish jury hailed his scathing critiques of urban western civilisation and the "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" of his stories of native populations in Africa and Latin America. His novels, whose settings range from the Sahara to Mauritius, are expected to see a massive sales boost in Britain, where he is currently out of print and barely known....
Le Clézio, who publishes books at a rate of around one a year, shot to fame in France as a 23-year-old with his first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (The Interrogation), a portrait of a young man's mental illness. It won critical acclaim and a major literary prize, and his looks saw him dubbed French literature's Steve McQueen. Yesterday French media still referred to him as a blue-eyed "elegant cowboy".
The "Steve McQueen" of French literature. Got it.
May I respectfully suggest that the French media knows nothing about either Steve McQueen or cowboys.
Recognizing that I am something of a Philistine when it comes to literary criticism, I found the whole article to be hilarious in an "at them" rather than "with them" sort of way.
4 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Oct 10, 06:30:00 AM:
Well the Guardian may compare this Le Clézio guy to Steve McQueen, but until he shows us his stuff at the wheel of a 390 Mustang fastback in the streets of San Francisco a la Frank Bullitt or on a Wehrmacht motorcyle on the German-Swiss border in the style of Sgt. Virgil "Cooler King" Hilts, I ain't buyin' it. Because we all know McQueen did his own stunts - so in his case, the characters and the actor were one.
Then again, the Nobel prize committee seems to make a habit of rewarding frauds. Like Peace prize "winners" Rigoberta Menchu, Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Jimmuh "Shameless" Carter.
By , at
Fri Oct 10, 07:13:00 AM:
... or Algore. Somehow a French Cowboy reminds me of Brokeback Mountain, but maybe I'm just shamelessly American in that I think of French guys as sissys who bring fresh pastries and hot java to our guys when they help out in the war efforts.
And sure, I know they're not all pussies, but on balance ...
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By , at
Fri Oct 10, 05:27:00 PM:
"Steve McQueen." Could have been a lot worse - they might have said he was the Jerry Lewis or David Hasselhof of French Literature.
