Reading Guide: <i>Wandering Star</i>

Reading Guide: Wandering Star

Wandering Star by J.M. G. Le Clézio

Wandering Star was first published in its original French in 1992 by the notable Gallimard and has been put out by Curbstone Press in a masterful translation by C. Dickson. Though less well-known in the U.S., Le Clézio's fiction is well-recognized in France. C. Dickson has worked with and published Le Clézio’s work before: a short story in Another Chicago Magazine in 1994, one in The Chicago Review in 2000 and his book, The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, recently done by the University of Nebraska Press in January, 2003.
Wandering Star is at once a painful chronicle and a romance in the epic sense . It tells two discrete stories linked by an adventitious connection when two girls briefly meet. One is Esther, a Jewess (called Helène while her parents attempt to submerge their identity after having emigrated to the south of France during the beginning of World War II). After many wanderings and much suffering she and her mother finally make it to Eretz Yisraël. The other is Nejma, a Palestinian girl who has been forced to flee to refugee camps upon the establishment of the Israeli state.
Thus Wandering Star contains two wanderers whose stories interconnect less by plot than by the substance of their stories: that substance concerns suffering along with the spark of hope that keeps them alive during their wanderings. The beginning of the novel shows Esther and her parents (her father is a member of the maquis) in the little town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie near Nice in 1943 during its occupation by the Italians. This period is described almost lyrically—an age of innocence—because the Italians do not press fiercely on their French “hosts”. In a way this section is a kind of “coming-of-age” prelude to what follows: the flight of the Italians as the Germans come in to occupy the town. This forces all the Jews, both practicing and non-practicing (such as Esther and her family) to try to cross the mountains into Italy. The scenes describing their suffering and the religion that keeps them going through the cold, wet mountains are some of the most moving I have recently read. Le Clézio seems to me a master in the quick and permanent establishment of character and the evocative description of nature. The descriptions of humans struggling through the stupendous nature of which they are both a part and yet separate from, evoke large, biblical associations. The group, dragging their belongings, the agèd dropping by the wayside, is decimated; but Esther and her mother manage to arrive in a small Italian village on the other side of the border, where they becomes servants in an inn. The maqui father is killed on a mission, and part of Esther‚s life is dedicated to finding out precisely how and where this happened. Eventually, daughter and mother journey back into France to try and reach the port at Marsailles in order to emigrate to the Holy Land. The rest of their tale brings to anguished life the sufferings and disappointments they go through, but which lead to their ultimate success, if their ability to survive their own lives can be so described.
The story of Nejma is in its way even more painful, for what we find here is the horror of life in the camps, specifically Nour Chams in 1948. Le Clézio shows the hunger, thirst, and filth which result in malnutrition and despair, the seeds of the anarchy we have come to witness today. But Nejma is taken under the wing of the old woman, Aamma Houriya, who teaches her marvelous tales and shows her the way to survive in this man-made desert. Just as Esther is calmed and fortified by nature and the mysteries of the religion that lies in her background, so Nejma is fortified by Aamma Houriya’s kindness and her traditional tales. These latter give Nejma a magical past, a human connection, that helps her to see some hope and beauty. Finally she leaves the camps with Saadi, a black who adores her and wishes to lead her back to his African homeland. They suffer the blazing, arid heat of the desert and its freezing nights, but it is doubtful they will ever reach Saadi’s home. The final words of this section are: “The road had no end”.
Esther carries a notebook in which Nejma has inscribed her name at their very brief meeting, one girl finishing her wanderings, the other beginning them . They are different in cultural backgrounds, but humanly identical in their courage, power of endurance, faith in something outside themselves, and most of all, in their suffering. Perhaps this is why Le Clézio names his book in the singular: one (not two) Wandering Star.
I read Wandering Star with great pleasure and complete absorption. It is a truly beautiful and fortifying novel that centers on a significant subject very much on people's minds today.
—Matthew N. Proser, University of Connecticut

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Wandering Star by J.M. G. Le Clézio