Terra Amata
J. M. G. Le Clézio
Language: English
Pages: 147
ISBN: B000IL7NOM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave.
Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of language and the imagination, Terra Amata brilliantly explores humankind's place in the universe, the relationship between us and the Earth we inhabit and, ultimately, how to live.
Vathek (Oxford World's Classics)
and houses with red roofs. Trees, with masses of leaves and branches, faint smells, scents of sugar or pepper, rustlings, cries, sudden flashes. But they couldn’t get through the closed window, and even if they could enter the room they couldn’t be recognized any more. It was all so far away now it might never have existed. It was like a curtain of mist above the horizon, it was a blanket of clouds and vapour without movement and without relief. The boy called Chancelade was old: he’d lost his
was going. For a little while there had been certain instructions in his mind, words of some kind that indicated something. He’d seen them as if they were written up on white hoardings: CIGARETTES SWEETS PAPER COFFEE Then the words had disappeared and the streets no longer led anywhere. He stumbled along on his shaky legs, one step, another step, stick forward, one step, another step, stick forward, and so on. He could see the grey pavement unfolding slowly in front of him covered with
Or crawl over hot stones with the bodies of vipers. You can go among the grasses vibrating your cockchafer’s wings; feel misty space with your snail’s horns; even float in pale water in a halo of luminous threads, and be named jellyfish. There was always matter before, beneath and around you. There were always walls of gentleness and violence, ceilings of smells, floors of noise and heat, incidents of colour. The room is everywhere, yes, everywhere. Nothing has been left behind, nothing lost.
slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires. On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime?
chocolate. You look at the dim photographs with girls smiling and climbing out of cars revealing sun-tanned thighs, girls running along beaches in skin-tight blue and orange swimsuits, their long hair blown across their faces in the wind and sunshine. You look at all this in silence, not happy, when really you ought every second to rush out into the street and carve in the bark of every plane-tree, scrawl on every wall and on every sidewalk : JUNE 11, 1966 I AM ALIVE But that wouldn’t be
