Le Clézio, J: African

The African is the autobiographical account of a pivotal moment in Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Clézio's childhood. Praised by the Swedish Academy as 'a reconstruction, a vindication, and the recollection of a boy who lived in the shadow of a stranger he was obliged to love', The African is now available in English for the first time.

In 1948, young Le Clézio, with his mother and brother, left behind a still-devastated Europe to join his father, a military doctor in Nigeria, from whom he'd been separated by the war. In Le Clézio's characteristically intimate, poetic voice, the narrative relates both the dazzled enthusiasm the child feels at discovering newfound freedom in the African savannah and his torment at discovering the rigid authoritarian nature of his father.

The major preoccupations of Le Clézio's life and work can be traced back to these early years in Africa. The question of colonialism, so central to the author, was a primary source of contention for his father. Le Clézio suggests that however estranged we may be from our parents, however foreign they may appear, they still leave an indelible mark on us. His father's anti-colonialism becomes The African's legacy to his son, who would later become a world-famous champion of endangered peoples and cultures.