SOURCE: Levy, Karen D. “Intersected Pasts and Problematic Futures: Oedipal Conflicts and Legendary Catastrophe in J. M. G. Le Clézio's Onitsha and Étoile errante.” International Fiction Review 25, nos. 1–2 (1998): 36–49.

In the following essay, Levy uses psychoanalysis and feminist theory to explore the protagonists's “fascination with the past” in Onitsha and Étoile errante.

Since the publication of his first novel, Le Procès-verbal (The Interrogation, 1963), in which the protagonist Adam Pollo finds refuge from the aggressions of modern life in an asylum, J. M. G. Le Clézio has been exploring the wounds of the human condition, caused, in his eyes, by expulsion from the liquid paradise of the womb and the fall into time. His characters are caught in various ways between the desire to lose themselves in the simultaneously comforting yet potentially fatal embrace of the maternal and the challenge of being able to mourn their loss...