Attain Terra Amata Written By J.M.G. Le Clézio Conveyed As Booklet

in parts, eminently skimmable at other parts, "He had come from far, from the depths of the night, from the depths of obscure regions, to see all this, to walk on the buckled earth, to inhale these smells and touch these bodies and hear these incomprehensible voices.
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This lyrical and boldly experimental novel is an allegory for the genesis of humankind through the life and lens of its protagonist, Chancelade.


Through the novel, we see instances of his life, As a child, Chancelade likes to play on the beach, As he grows older and his consciousness awakens, he becomes perceptive to the innumerably beautiful details in the small things he encounters, He finds universes etched within grains of sand, Grand unrecorded dynasties in ant colonies, Every leaf, object, insect, animal, planet has a name and enduring history for its existence, Chancelade grows older and drifts through other instances of his life, He finds love. Has a son. Becomes wrinkled and frail. His body weakens. He dies. He is buried. But through it all, his consciousness absorbs every experience and his body bears a mark of everything he has ever felt, heard, seen, known, and encountered.
He is the novel that records its voyage through time,

It is hard to categorize this book as belonging to any specific genre, It is simply a series of fragments depicting intimate details of a sentient being observing the world as it grows from a child to an old man.


Le Clézio's writing is very experimental and his stylistic choices might well split readers, But there's no denying that his prose has a breathtaking, timeless quality delivered with poetic magnanimity, Some of the passages I came across in this book were downright beautiful to read,

This is a flawed novel but the universality it tries to encompass is what makes Terra Amata such an intimate reading experience,.stars. The architect Le Corbusier reportedly said that God was in the details others have claimed the same about the devil, And it's in the details that Le Clézio finds Terra Amata "the beloved Earth", if my Latin serves whether what he finds is God or Devil.
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This is the first Le Clézio I've read, and supposedly not the best starting point most people who have read him suggest his debut Le ProcèsVerbal The Interrogation as a sampler of his early avantgarde work, but this was the one that was still in the library, and I can't say it's scared me off further exploration.
In fact, I liked it a lot,

Terra Amata is, in its way, a very barebones thing, It's the story of the life of a man named Chancelade de la chance, from his early childhood to his grave, And it's not like his life is all that special he's a pretty ordinary guy, and not much out of the ordinary ever happens to him.
What makes it more than just boring ultrarealism is how the story is told, See, Chancelade likes details. Right from the beginning, even as a small child, we see him extrapolating entire worlds from the smallest things, trying to understand his world by submerging himself in it, trying to put words to everything he sees and feels.
. . the whole "cosmos in a grain of sand" bit,

You should be everywhere at the same time, on the mountaintops when the aurora borealis flares up, in the depths of the sea by the volcanos' mute explosions, in the trunks of the trees when the rain slowly starts falling and each drop detonates on each leaf.


Le Clézio's world isn't a cold, inhospitable place it's a world that's teeming with beauty, and Chancelade wanders through it in constant infatuation, as if drunk on everything's existence and becoming.
At times, this is a horriffic experience anyone who's read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy might compare it to the Total Perspective Vortex: if you see how insignificant you seem in the vastness of the world, you're supposed to go crazy.
Except he doesn't, not really he just has to find a way to live this incredible thrill ride of sensory overload that even an ordinary life can be.


The world was too alive, you couldn't defeat it, Space had too much space, time too many seconds, days, weeks, milennia, You could no longer do anything to understand, You could no longer meet the frightening gaze

of the absolute, You had to dive headfirst into vertigo and work, love, hate, suffer, be happy, kill, give birth, . . because there was nothing else to do,

Writing something that goes more or less like this forpages well OK, there is ordinary life and dialogue and other characters in there too requires a lot of the author, but the young Le Clézio is up to it with a few notable snags when Chancelade falls in love, he spends a few short chapters speaking in sign language, morse code and invented languages to try and express his inner turmoil.
. . which, nah. But even then, the prose is, . . precise. I've rarely come across a writer who's this good at navigating rather complex existential morasses with a language that's this clear, vivid and, well, . . fun like I've said elsewhere, I'm occasionally reminded of the extatic freeform prose of Clarice Lispector, while the slight metafictional overtones call Perec or Calvino to mind.
OK, so the novel tends to crawl up its own ass a few times I suppose you can only write so much about the experience of everyday mundanity, and the pro and epilogues that talk directly to the reader don't really do it any favours.
But most of the time, it's a real joy to read, As in life, you take the bad with the good, hope the latter outweighs the former, hold on in the sharp curves and feel the tickle in your belly.


Nerves, nerves everywhere,

I picked this book accidentally and I couldnt help marvelling at the simplicity and honesty the introduction has, Captivated I began. There is no story as such for it can be the story of any random person, It rather felt like dairy entries,

Reading this was as good as a roller coaster ridethere were times when I found it enchanting and at times it became unbearable that I wanted to shut it permanently.
Reflections on the journey we make as men on this earth is what this book dwells on I am being extremely naive trying to summarise, The conclusion is nothing less than perfect, But there were many aspects that I missed, of that I am sure, and I will revisit this book to discover more,
The author leads us through the life of Chancelade from his luminous childhood till the end or the beginning, telling us that the protagonist is going back to what was before, sun, clear air, peace, sea, strength, beauty because everything is eternal, we are here all the time with the sun and the rain and the wind and the ice and the fire.
Birth and death are only fables, In this timespan called life we are only playing the game with ourselves to lose as slowly as possible, suffering as little as possible, our enemy is us, we are fighting against time.
We live in hell and heaven joined together so we must suffer and love,

There was really nothing to be hoped for outside that place, that time, that destiny, One would never penetrate the defences of the unknown, never get away from this old earth, Everything there was was there, You had to play and move about and think without stopping, with all your delirious and contradictory powers, You had to go on with the adventure once begun, without wanting to, torn to pieces by doing so, You had to give each thing its name, and sign each move and event with all the hatred and all the love you were capable of.


How were you to say you were happy, at that moment, on that part of the earth, with that woman, with yourself, and with everything else It wasnt easy to say, and yet you had to say it.
You had to forget the fatal issue, pain, decay, the minute but effective assaults of time, You had to forget the void, the being abandoned, the being alone, and live out your own adventure with joy, Nothing counted any more but this explosion of life, an explosion beautiful and unique, Out of the long night, opaque, insensible, there issued now this ball of fire more luminous than a million suns, shut up inside the body and blazing there.
The glare is harsh, it hurts, it flays, but the pain is also the greatest of pleasures: it is the power of life, There were so many things to believe, so many things to love, hate, touch, drink, look at, feel, understand, listen to, judge, suffer, hope, There was so much fear, so much evil, gentleness, noise or cold, From farthest time or space this wealth had come to Chancelade, a man among men, an inhabitant of this planet, and had changed him into a bomb.
Everything was there, present, palpable, It called for more than words, it called for shouting, for howling at other people at the top of your voice in the street, Maybe they wouldnt have understood, but thats what you ought to have done: open your mouth and yell as loud as you could at three oclock in the afternoon with the veins standing out on your neck and temples bursting:

In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs.
That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreenwipers moan back and forth, A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb, Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs heads, A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake, Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly, A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth, It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed, Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.

On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly, What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside, What is one days reading in a lifetime What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization.
There are millions of things everywhere, Isnt the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder,