WHEN THE Swedish Academy announced it was giving the Nobel Prize in Literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio yesterday, the permanent secretary of the award committee said: "His works have a cosmopolitan character. Frenchman, yes, but moreso a traveller, a citizen of the world, a nomad."
Le Clézio (68) has spent much of his life outside France, in Mauritius and Nigeria, Mexico and Panama, Britain and the US. He is fluent in French and English, and could justifiably be called the most globalised Nobel laureate. Condemnation of western materialism and concern for the weak and excluded are central to his oeuvre, which counts some 50 novels.
The Nobel committee praised Le Clézio as "an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation".
Success came early to Le Clézio, when he won the Prix Renaudot in 1963 for his first novel, Le Procès-Verbal, which explored the flight from commonly accepted ways of thought into extreme states of mind. Four years later, he was expelled from Thailand, where he was doing his military service, because he denounced child prostitution there. He was transferred to Mexico. The Latin American Institute then hired him to live for four years with the Indians of Panama, an experience that deeply influenced his work. He went on to teach in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Le Clezio's novels are easily readable and have a wide following in France, perhaps because he is in tune with the times. In Fever(1966) and Flood(1967) he portrays the trouble and fear reigning in western cities.
Ritournelle de la faim, his latest novel, just published by Gallimard, is a fictionalised version of his mother's life in the 1930s.
"It was a terrible period," Le Clézio told France-Inter radio yesterday, referring to the 1930s.
His novel "talks about money, or the lack thereof, about people falling down the social ladder. There was a stock market crash and the property market collapsed. The themes are the same as today: the lack of security and jobs; whether we should close our borders to immigrants."
Though Le Clézio spoke on France-Inter before the prize was announced, he was almost sure of winning. "It's something that gives you a bounce, that makes you want to keep writing," he said. "One writes to be read, to get answers. It is an answer."
Asked about his acceptance speech, Le Clézio said he would like to talk about "the difficulty that young people have getting published" and would argue for the abolition of all taxes on books.
"Ours is a system in which it is very difficult to speak, to make one's voice heard. You must endlessly knock on doors, bang against walls, especially when you are young. It must be made easier."
He described his joy in writing: "When you write novels, you change personality. You become someone else, and it's delicious to totally change personality, to get into the mind of someone who lives in another period, of someone of the opposite sex . . .
"I write novels because I'm incapable of writing memoirs. I am reluctant to look at my own life, to consider it has any interest. On the other hand, novels enable you to slip personal elements in, to dance with history . . ."
Le Clézio is the 14th French writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since 1901. Jean d'Ormesson, the writer and member of the Académie Francaise, said the award was the perfect put-down to those Americans who claim French culture is dead.
President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of his "immense pride" and sent his "warm congratulations" to Le Clézio, whom, he said, "honours France, the French language, and la Francophonie."
Peace prize: Ahern speculation
FORMER TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern last night said he did not know if he was shortlisted for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaking following the launch of Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú's book God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland, the former taoiseach said he was bombarded with calls from people asking if he was shortlisted following an RTÉ news broadcast which said he and former British prime minister Tony Blair were rumoured to be among the nominees.
"I don't know about the shortlists, they just rang last night [ Wednesday] to say we were in the nominations," he added.
The Nobel committee received 197 nominations for this year's peace prize. Some 164 individuals and 33 organisations are among the nominees.
Each year the committee sends invitations to thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others, asking them to submit candidates for the prize.
Speculation regarding the nominees has been mounting throughout the week, with Bob Geldof, former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Finnish peace negotiator Martti Ahtisaari among those listed as possibilities by Norwegian TV.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce the winner of the 2008 peace prize today, with the award presented at a ceremony in Oslo City Hall on December 10th.
Last year's peace prize went jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to the former US vice-president, Al Gore, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". PAMELA NEWENHAM