> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Le-Clezio-toile-errante/84045
> BAnQ (Le nouvelliste, 25 juil. 1992) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/3261566

I looked forward to another of Le Clezio's books after reading Onitsha which I loved. I found Wandering Star lopsided to say the least, giving a much bigger sense of the life of a Jewish girl in exile in France and Italy, in Israel and when an adult in Canada. The opposite main character is a Palestinian girl treated with tragedy only in the refugee camp.

I think it is very important to see the needs and goals of both persecuted Jews and displaced Palestinians. He tried to do this through these characters: two adolescent girls - one nominally Jewish l whose parents are secular, and whose father is killed in the Resistance in France and the other an orphaned Palestinian village girl who ends in a refugee camp where the conditions are horrendous - no water, and no food when the aid donations are scarce or non-existant.

Le Clezio spends a great deal of time bringing the Jewish girl to life, and follows her through family life, friendships, a bit of puppy love, then an excruciating trek over the Alps with her mother into Italy where they have to do menial work since the father was killed in the French resistance and their money ran out. They are smuggled into Palestine finally after having been turned back once by the British Customs Officers. .After they reach Palestine they find work in a Kibbutz, where the young shepherd of the kibbutz is murdered. The heroine's new fiance is also killed fighting for Israeli independence.

The section about the Palestinian girl is entirely tragic, albeit very short in comparison. I think if the purpose of the book was to show the suffering on both sides, it did the job, but the space devoted to the Jewish girl contains a chunk of relatively happy life before the exile with loving parents. The part covering the partly orphaned Palestinian girl is much shorter and almost entirely one of suffering. I think the meeting of the two girls where they exchange names and never meet again is too contrived and mechanical. I suppose it is meant to be symbolic of the feelings of closeness between Arabs and Jews before the partition.

Le Clezio writes beautifully and the characters and scenery come to brilliant life. However, the Palestinian side of the story needed at least a section to show the life of the Palestinian girl in her village before the forced removal of the people..and their existance in a refugee camp. Showing the Jewish girl as a grown woman in a sort of afterword seemed unnecessary. Le Clezio did not preach, or take sides. He just showed the difficulties and tragedies on both sides, but the Jewish girl found happiness and fulfillment. The future of the Palestinian girl was never shown. ( )

Dedicated to "the captured children", Wandering Star is the story of two young girls, each driven from her home, whose paths cross briefly on a dusty road outside Jerusalem. Esther is thirteen years old and living in exile in a remote corner of southeastern France in 1943. Her father is a member of the Resistance and is often in whispered conversations with strangers at their kitchen table or out guiding people through the mountains to Italy. Her mother insists on calling her Hélène, despite everyone in the village knowing they are Jewish because they must register with the Italian soldiers every morning. Helene grows up running wild in the village, with a couple of young admirers at her heels. Her exposure to the war is limited to little incidences: Mr. Ferne's piano, his one solace, is taken away for the amusement of the Italian soldiers; Rachel is ostracized in the village for having an affair with an officer. But everything changes when Italy surrenders and the town is turned over to the Germans. Esther and her mother flee, along with most of the other Jews in town, trying to cross the mountains into Italy. From there they hope to catch a boat to Palestine.

Nejma is introduced over half way through the book. She is a Palestinian girl who has been removed to the Nour Chams Camp in the summer of 1948 to make room for the new nation of Israel. Her life in the camp is lonely: her father is away fighting, her mother died when Nejma was young, and she was sent from the only home she knew to this barren stretch of desert. People in the camp are desperate. There is little water and the only food comes in on irregular United Nations trucks. Capable and mature for her age, Nejma takes in a newly arrived woman whom she calls aunt. Together they try to eke out an existence. She falls in love with a nomad, who is also at the camp, but theirs is a difficult relationship. Life and death balance on a knife's edge in the camp, and eventually Nejma flees, in an attempt to survive despite the threat of Israeli soldiers.

The reader is caught in a conundrum by the juxtaposition of the two girls. It is easy to sympathize with Esther, as the reader knows what awaits her if she is caught, better than she knows herself. Her flight creates tension that can only be eased by sanctuary in the land of light and Jerusalem. Yet, halfway through the story, the author introduces an equally sympathetic character, whose harsh fate is caused by the arrival of thousands of Jews like Esther. Nejma is forced into a concentration camp that one cannot help but compare to those that Esther escaped. Lacking the systematic slaughter of the Nazis for sure, but a camp ruled by neglect, starvation, and disease, nonetheless.

This moral comparison makes for an interesting premise, but something about the story falls flat. Perhaps it is the fault of the translation, but the writing is very bland. Short, bald narrative seems more appropriate for a young adult novel perhaps.

At dawn, the rain woke them. It was a fine drizzle rustling softly in the pine needles over their heads, mingling with the crashing of the torrent. Drops started coming through the roof of their shelter, ice-cold drops that spattered on their faces. Elizabeth tried to arrange the branches better, but she only succeeded in making it rain more. So they took their suitcases and, wrapped in their shawls, huddled up at the foot of a larch tree, shivering. The shapes of the trees stood out starkly in the dawn light. A white fog was creeping down the valley. It was so cold that Esther and Elizabeth just sat there hugging each other at the foot of the larch, not wanting to move.

In addition, the point of view changes frequently in the Esther plot line: sometimes the story is told in the third person, sometimes from Esther's point of view, occasionally from someone else's. It's not a major point, but makes the book feel hurried or like a rough draft.

While I wouldn't necessarily recommend [Wandering Star], I am interested in reading another work by Le Clézio to see if this one is an anomaly for the Nobel Prize winning author. The preponderance of his other works seem to be set in Africa and deal with colonialism. Perhaps a more usual topic for the author and a different translator will change my first impression of his writing. ( )

Mycket vackert språk. Gripande och sorgligt ( )

This was my first Le Clezio novel, and I feel tempted to read more. I like the way Le Clezio makes politics personal; in this case the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Even though that is not literally the topic of this novel, it does seem to be at the heart of it.

The story centers mainly around Esther, a young Jewish girl growing up in southern France during the occupation. While the Italians are in charge life is more or less bearable, but once the Germans take over a dark period starts. Le Clezio takes a lot of time (and pages) to describe life in the occupied village, during spring and summer, the lovely nature, the children playing in the fields and at the riverside, the friendships. Life seems almost pretty, were it not that there is a continuous shadow of sentences foreboding great pain and misery in these chapters. When the Italians leave, most of the Jewish people try to flee across the mountains into Italy. Most of them don't make it. For Esther, her life as a refugee starts. She finds great comfort in religion, even if she was raised without it. Years later, she and her mother make it to Palestine, which soon becomes Israel.

The cynical truth is that while Esther thinks she is finding a home, her true and destined home, other people thereby become refugees. During a short moment Esther looks into the eyes of Nejma, a Palestinian girl, on her way to a refugee camp. Nejma is the second, though minor, protagonist of this novel. She arrives at a refugee camp, where she and her people are slowly forgotten by the international community. Her destiny remains unsure.

I thought this novel was very well written, though perhaps a little slow at times, and gave insight into a political conflict at a very individual level. Without putting blame on either party. I would recommend it. ( )