The Prospector

by J.-M. G. Le Clézio

Paperback, 2008

Status

Available

Publication

Boston : David R Godine, 2008.

Description

Obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair treasure he heard about in his youth, Alexis L'Etang abandons his job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from remote tropical islands to the hell of the First World War, and from a love affair with the elusive Ouma to a momentous confrontation with the search that has consumed his life.

Media reviews

The Prospector offers a wonderful one-volume compendium of all the grand myths rooted in the European colonial experience, combining elements from Paul et Virginie, Robinson Crusoe, and Indiana Jones. Alexis, known as Ali, and his beloved sister, Laure, live in an Eden nestled on the island of
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Mauritius. A child drawn to nature, he is nevertheless most enthralled by his father's dreams of a privateer's treasure. Yet this same father's vision of bringing electricity to the island leads to the family's ruin (thanks to a ferocious hurricane, brilliantly described). To recover his family's paradise lost, the adult Ali embarks upon a hunt for the pirate's gold. "I left to put an end to the dream, in order that my life might begin. I am going to take this journey to its conclusion. I know that I will find something."
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1 more
The present tense seems to be more fre­quently employed by modern French novelists than by their British or American counterparts; but few contemporary writers can have resorted to it so consistently as Le Clézio. Concomitant with his absorption in a continuous present is an impulse to
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unrestrained exten­sion. "Comme il est long, le temps de la mer!" exclaims the narrator of his latest novel, the Mauritian Alexis L'Estang, resuming his obsessive search for pirate gold in the Indian Ocean on returning from service in the tren­ches of the First World War. His story begins in 1892, when he is eight, and spans thirty years; yet despite the dates, the novel is in no sense a historical one, but could be most fittingly described as a fable. Its characters are of quasi-archetypal simplicity, and they communicate in dialogue of taciturn breviloquence. Apart from the narrator's abiding but tenuous relationship with his sister Laure, the novel's principal human interest centres on his chastely erotic idyll with Ouma, the young native girl or "manaf" he finds on the island of Rodrigues, to which plans left him by his father have led him in search of a hoard of plundered gold concealed there by a legendary corsair.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member John
This is an interesting book. In one sense not much happens—there is very little dialogue and the locales of action shift in chunks of time—but in another sense much happens to the protagonist, through whose eyes we experience the story. In this respect, I would quibble with the translation of
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the title; in the original French, the book was called Le Chercheur d’or ; chercheur can be translated as prospector, but I would argue that in English “prospector” has a fairly narrow connotation tied to mineral exploration, and this is misleading in the context of this book; Alexis L’Etang is more of a searcher than a prospector, and though an obsession with finding buried treasure occupies a fair bit of the story, in the end, Alexis is searching for much more than that, although it takes him a long time to realize it himself: he is searching for meaning in his life which is something far more precious and far more elusive than gold.

The story opens in 1892 on the island of Mauritius when Alexis is about eight years old: “As far back as I can remember I have listened to the sea: to the sound of it mingling with the wind in the filao needles, the wind that never stops blowing….It is the sound that cradled my childhood. I can hear it now, deep inside me; it will come with me wherever I go…” . The last lines of the book are: “Now night has fallen. To the depths of my being I hear the living sound of the rising sea.” Although most of the action takes place on land, the sea is a centerpiece of this book, the sea as a living, eternal thing that can be beautiful and sublime and then dark, dangerous and destructive; the latter sense always lurking, always potential in even the calmest days; it can serve mankind as a conduit for transportation, as a link for far-flung places and a source of food and sustenance for millions, but it can never be subjugated; the sea breathes through the unchanging, regular rhythms of its tides, just as a man breathes for life, and this sense of a slowness, a regularity of breath permeates the very writing and telling of this story.

The bare bones of the story are easily given: Alexis lives with his sister, Laure, and their parents in an isolated house on the island of Mauritius, a bucolic, idyllic existence of sun and sea, exploration, home teaching by a loving mother, a benevolent but often absent father bent on his schemes that will ultimately see his bankruptcy and the eviction of the family to poverty in a nearby town. Upon the death of his father, Alexis takes to the sea and an island where he is convinced (a passion of his father’s) that there is a buried treasure for which he has the map if he can figure out the clues. This occupies Alexis for some years, during which time he meets Ouma, a beautiful young woman from a local indigenous people who live isolated in the mountains and shun contact; Ouma herself has an interesting history as she lived for some years in France before returning to the island. Alexis does not find the pirate’s treasure; he joins the army in 1914 and serves in the trenches with distinction; returns home to his sister and mother, but is always drawn to finding Ouma again…and perhaps I won’t spoil the rest of the plot for those who might like to read it for themselves.

There is a powerful description of a hurricane that destroys the country home and hastens the departure of the family, and other descriptions of raging storms on land and at sea—but there is, in a sense, something clean in the naturalness of destruction by nature, as opposed to the obscene destructiveness of manmade slaughters such as the trenches of WWI. In this story nature is always the final refuge, the repository of what is good and clean and individual; almost all contacts with society or civilization are marked by greed, racism, struggles, bloody conflicts; the “reality” of the world keeps imposing whether through class struggles, economic disasters, epidemics, institutionalized racism ,and try as they might, neither Alexis nor Ouma, in the end, can continue to live in their splendid isolation.

This is a story about Alexis’s search for himself. It begins with his mad quest for the pirate gold which he thinks will close the circle with his dead father: “…everything at last will be put in order. I am finally going to fulfill the dream my father had for so long, the one that kept him searching and which haunted my childhood. My father’s will, not my own, must be carried out…I left to put an end to the dream, so that my life might begin…I know I will find something.” What he finds, eventually, is that life paths cannot be predicted or foreseen or controlled; he becomes estranged from his beloved sister, not out of malice, but because, “I suddenly realize that in the course of my years of exile I lost her. She has followed another path and become someone else; our lives no longer coincide.” It is the more pragmatic, more realistic Laure who tells Alexis: “It’s no good wanting what no longer exists.”

In the end, although Alexis has a clearer idea of life and what he can expect from it, he learns that there is no endpoint, there is only constant looking and experiencing of life, and for him, that means a return to the sea: “We’ll go to the other side of the earth, to a place where we need fear neither signs in the sky nor the wars of men. Now night has fallen. To depths of my being I hear the living sound of the rising sea.”
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LibraryThing member kidzdoc
This novel about a man's search for a lost treasure and personal fulfillment begins on the island of Mauritius in 1892, where the eight year old Alexis L'Estang lives with his parents and beloved older sister Laure in an isolated house, surrounded by rich foliage and close to the sea, which
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nurtures and draws him in every night. His older friend Denis, the son of the black cook who lives nearby, teaches him about the mysteries of the sea and the local flora in the mountainous forest above it. His father also passes on to him his dream to find the hidden treasure of the Unknown Corsair, through maps and stories.

The family's idyllic existence is disrupted by tragedy, causing it to sink into poverty, and Alexis is forced to take on responsibilities in advance of his years. However, he does not abandon his father's dream, and he eventually travels to the island of Rodrigues to seek the treasure that will ensure his family's good standing. There he meets Ouma, the love of his life, but his search is disrupted by the onset of the Great War, and he must abandon his search, and Ouma. Eventually he is able to return, as an older man whose dream and love have not been diminished by time, but his family's continued poverty and changes in the region cause his dual goals to become more distant and seemingly unachievable.

The Prospector is filled with evocative descriptions of the sea and island life, which was its main strength, along with the love that Alexis and Ouma shared for each other, and the description of the horrors of trench warfare. However, the other characters, especially Laure and Alexis' mother, were not portrayed as richly, and I had some difficulty in understanding Alexis' motivations and actions. Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed, and would highly recommend, this beautifully told story.
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LibraryThing member alexandriaginni
Lots of symbolism (e.g., modern man's yearning to return to paradise lost; man's inhumanity to man, whether family member or stranger; the meaning/value of life; the grass is always greener elsewhere, etc.). Minimal plot and character development. Lovely images. Reminds me of Saramago's "The Cave".
LibraryThing member thorold
Loosely based on Le Clézio's grandfather, the narrator of this novel, Alexis, grows up on a cane plantation in Mauritius in the 1890s. After the family fortunes are destroyed by a hurricane, Alexis follows his father's unrealised dream of searching for pirate treasure on Rodrigues island.
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Naturally enough, it doesn't turn out to be a simple matter of yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, the treasure resolves itself into something more complicated and symbolic, and along the way Alexis has to confront the evils of colonialism, the horrors of the First World War, and a curiously innocent relationship with a (possibly imaginary) young woman, Ouma.

More than anything else, this seems to be a book in which the narrator's experience of the natural world around him — the tropical landscape of Mauritius and Rodrigues, the Indian Ocean, the night sky, even the shell-blasted mud of Flanders — is forever taking over from any merely human interactions and pushing them into the background. It's all very beautiful, you can really lose yourself in the descriptive passages, but on stepping back a little you do have to keep wondering about the selfishness of this man who can lose himself in contemplation of rocks, trees and stars and forget all about his sister, mother and girlfriend for dozens of pages at a time.
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Language

Original language

French

Barcode

6828

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