ABSTRACT
In his recent novels especially, J. M. G. Le Clézio seeks to challenge and move the reader by raising key questions about our fragile, violent, ecologically threatened, interdependent, multicultural world. Recalling the disquieting ambience of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Onitsha— now translated by Alison Anderson—first probes the uneasy relationships between a father and a son, and a husband and a wife, who barely know each other. Onitsha also includes a scathing critique of colonialism, through the voice of Maou, who increasingly speaks out against the ways the white masters treat the locals. Her views marginalize the family with respect to the other Europeans, and the father’s business affairs collapse. His fiction, whose scenes and details thus usually stand at only a slight remove from the facts of his own life, is thereby warmly personal in tone and thoroughly credible in effect. An incessant traveler, he is driven by a desire to understand how different cultures, lifestyles, mentalities, and values interact.
