Desert @ Bookslut

from a letter exchange at Bookslut on the Nobel Prize:

“So, Ben, it’s beautiful. The book. The desert roars at the center of it; the desert, itself seems to have a pulpy heartbeat, a scorching cold presence in the text. I could feel the desert in the substance of the book that I was carrying around. I stopped many times to reread a sentence, a punishing sentence — where some element of human brutality or stark nature was displayed, flayed, for me, the reader. [. . .]  the translation of Desert strikes me as spectacular. I could piece the French sentences back together from the English sentences, and I could hear the music of Le Clézio's prose. It made me ache for the North African desert, which I’ve only seen one time, ache for its vacant, open, barren spaces.”