SOURCE: Imbert, Jean-Phillipe. “J. M. G. Le Clézio, Writer of Exile: A Treatment of Childhood and Exile in Désert and Étoile errante.” In Exiles and Migrants: Crossing Thresholds in European Culture and Society, pp. 201–11. England: Sussex Academic, 1997.

In the following essay, Imbert analyzes the motifs of exile and childhood in Désert and Étoile errante.

When the unaware reader embarks on Étoile errante,¹ little does he realise that a decade earlier Le Clézio had undertaken a similar voyage when writing Désert,² both books describing two departures into exile, two quests for self-discovery.

Désert, written in 1980, presents the reader with Lalla, a daughter of the hommes bleus (the Tuaregs, Berber nomads in the Sahara), whose past of untold tales of fighting for freedom will forever prevent her from remaining in France. In Étoile errante, published some twelve years later, set in summer 1943, the reader...