The Giants is a tirade on consumerism, mega marts, urban progress (or decay), technology, language, and communication. The book surprised the hell out of me. The first few pages left me wondering if I could even get through it; it was preachy, long winded, and repetitive. But Clézio’s words started to have an effect on me. They started to excite me, drew me in almost hypnotically. I no longer looked at the page numbers or the clock. I had vivid dreams, that were influenced (possibly by the xanax I started taking) by the ideas, images, illusions, that were perfectly captured in words. Words. He trapped me with his words.

But heads are not equipped with an anus, and whatever enters their brain-pan is stuck there for ever.

Le Clézio creates a dystopian society in our own backyard. Even something as tranquil as the horizon (a razorblade)seen over the sea becomes oppressive.

There was this sort of thin wire that separated the sky from the sea, a scacely visible line just below the countless tons of weight of the air that pressed down upon the sheet of water: air and water were like two blocks of marble, one on top of the other.

Words, in this society, our society, today, are weapons used by ’the Giants’, unknown masters that tell us to buy Crest and use Mobile Oil and we really would be better humans if we just sprayed a little Chanel No. 5 on our skin.

There are so many sounds competing within a single head that the cranium might well explode like a bomb. Craniums are dangerous. When on sees them balanced on top of bodies, like that, row after row of them, one can feel a kind of tremor pass through them, and one knows that at any moment they might explode.

The plot, threadbare, is inconsequential and there are only three characters; Tranquility, an employee at Hyperpolis, the mega market, Machine, a trolley collector at Hyperpolis, and Dumb Bogo, a mute whose fascinated with the pebble beach near Hyperpolis. But the words are beautifully poetic. ( )

The most experimental of Le Clezio's books might well be the Giants. Written in 1973 and translated by Simon Watson Taylor this novel is set in a place called Hyperpolis and at times this book may seem more like a polemic than a story--or as an all out attack on a future world of shopping malls, advertising, doublespeak propaganda, subliminal messaging and surveillance. Le Clezio's vision is of an unconscious population going through the motions of an everyday life lulled by an unending avalanche of advertisements going into the vast mall of Hyperpolis. The difference between an outside world of natural beauty emphasized by the sun and the sea is contrasted with the almost cavelike atmosphere as one enters this vast shopping emporium as neon advertisements flicker and surveillance cameras track the would be shoppers and deluge them with any number of unconscious stimulae. It's interesting how he makes this atmosphere seem almost empty of real human life as his character sweeps through it. Those who control it on the outside observing--taping and filming. Interspersed in the text our examples of advertising and thought control.
For instance from page 126--WITHOUT SMILING'It is dangerous to imagine that people are capable of rational conduct' Ernest Ditcher:'One of the principal tasks of publicity, in the conflict between pleasure and guilt, is not so much to sell a product as to grant permission to have pleasure without a feeling of guilt.' Or from page 50: 'Du Pont de Nemours survey on Supermarkets. Study of the speed at which eyelids blink, filmed by Vicary: Normal rhythm:
thirtytwo blinks per minute Tension: fifty to sixty per minute. In front of the merchandise displays at supermarkets: fourteen per minute. Vicary: "This is a case of hypnoidal trance, the first stage of hypnosis." Colours that induce sleep: yellow, red.'
Le Clezio's own first words: 'I tell you: free yourselves!' and his exortations throughout to the reader to wake himself up seem very prescient now at least to me as the western world at least in terms of a great number of individuals has become exponentially more materialistic, more arrogant and much less inclined towards cultural, ethical or intellectual goals. In any case I liked this book a lot and reccomend it highly. ( )