Look at him. Venerable. Wizened. With a mole, that one little facial flaw that completes the perfection. Good hair too. A nice shock of hair.

Jean Marie Gustave LeClezio, 2008’s Nobel Prize winner for literature. A fella who needs some introduction, for prior to his selection by the Nobel committee few on this side of the pond had heard of LeClezio. I confess that I had not.

In the days leading up to the announcement, the Nobel Folks summarily dismissed the notion that an American might possibly receive the prize. Horace Engdahl one of the members of the Sweedish committee that awards the Nobel summed up American literature this way:

The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

“Europe,” Engdahl added, “is still the center of the literary world.”

It’s a thought worth exploring, no matter how much it smacks of the American bashing that has come to typify European intelligentsia. The U.S. probably deserves to be bashed.

But that’s a thought for another post.

With Engdahl’s words sounding through my skull, I pick up LeClezio’s The Prospector. It is a story of loss: loss of love, family, security, innocence, the breakdown of civilization. It is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century as World War I breaks the peace, and perhaps this is where the world society first went wrong. I could not help but read the story with the question on my lips: “how is this novel participating in the big dialogue?”

But that question would only bore me, would ultimately cause me to put the book down with a yawn. It takes something more compelling to keep reading.

That something else is LeClezio’s love of his characters. He writes with subtle passion and in the process he draws you in, following him down the rabbit hole. The Prospector is set in and around the island nation of Mauritius. LeClezio spent his own boyhood in Mauritius, and he mines his childhood experience to bejewel his story, in a way that brings to mind another great Frenchie who Remembered Things Past. His writing is evocative, moving in that way that you just can’t quite summarize, like the plastic carnival ducks in a shooting gallery, you see them, you want to kill them, you want the prize, but damed if you can hit ‘em.

This is to say that LeClezio leaves you wanting more.

Add to this that he’s a heckuva good guy.

In receiving his prize, LeClezio used his fifteen minutes on the world radar to speak out for the poor, and he did so in a way that is close to every librarian’s heart, including and perhaps especially my own, viz. he called for a bridge to the digital divide, that gulf of seperation between those with access to the new technology and those without.

To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian. Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out?

He went on to insist that the world must provide for more libraries worldwide.

LeClezio deserves his prize. Not just because he has great hair.