Wandering Star
This is my second Le Clezio; the first being The Interrogation, his first novel. It seems to me that the two books have been written by two different authors. I like the second better and this does not mean that the first one is bad; in fact, it is more challenging to read.
There are two discrete stories in Wandering Star that are linked only by a very brief encounter between the two women who are are in a seemingly endless journey to nowhere. One is Esther, who, with his mother and other Jews she will meet along her journey from the French-Italian border to Israel, seems to be the microcosm of the so-called wandering Jews before, during, and after the war. The other is Nejma, a Palestinian girl, who, along with other Palestinians, has been driven out of the newly-founded state of Israel and forced to flee to the UN-controlled refugee camps.
Wandering Star is an epic: a story love, loss, longing, hope and survival told in beautiful, intimate, and lyrical prose. The moment I read the first few lines of the first page, I was hooked. I couldn’t put it down. What a wonderful piece of literature!
{July 23, 2009}
There are two discrete stories in Wandering Star that are linked only by a very brief encounter between the two women who are are in a seemingly endless journey to nowhere. One is Esther, who, with his mother and other Jews she will meet along her journey from the French-Italian border to Israel, seems to be the microcosm of the so-called wandering Jews before, during, and after the war. The other is Nejma, a Palestinian girl, who, along with other Palestinians, has been driven out of the newly-founded state of Israel and forced to flee to the UN-controlled refugee camps.
Wandering Star is an epic: a story love, loss, longing, hope and survival told in beautiful, intimate, and lyrical prose. The moment I read the first few lines of the first page, I was hooked. I couldn’t put it down. What a wonderful piece of literature!
{July 23, 2009}
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