Jean-Marie Le Clézio

J.-M. G. Le Clézio:
... If I had to assess my books I would say that they are what are most like me. In other words, for me it’s less a matter of expressing ideas than expressing what I am and what I believe in. When I write I am primarily trying to translate my relationship to the everyday, to events. We live in a troubled era in which we are bombarded by a chaos of ideas and images. The role of literature today is perhaps to echo this chaos.
…

We no longer have the presumptuousness to believe, as they did in Sartre’s day, that a novel can change the world. Today, writers can only record their political impotence. When you read Sartre, Camus, Dos Passos or Steinbeck you can clearly see that these great committed writers had limitless confidence in the future of mankind and in the power of the written word. I remember that when I was eighteen, I read editorials by Sartre, Camus and Mauriac in L’Express. They were committed essays which showed the way. Can anyone conceivably imagine today that an editorial in a newspaper could help solve the problems that are ruining our lives? Contemporary literature is a literature of despair.
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My favourite novelists are Stevenson and Joyce. They drew their inspiration from their first years of life. Through writing they relived their past and tried to understand the "whys" and "hows" of it…
Literature is only strong when it manages to express the first sensations, the first experiences, the first ideas, the first disappointments.
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I don’t know for the Nobel prize but I know what I would like to talk about publicly. I would like to talk about the war that kills children. This, for me, is the most terrible thing of our age. Literature is also a means of reminding people of this tragedy and bringing it back to centre stage. In Paris recently, statues of women were veiled in order to condemn the fact that women in Afghanistan are denied freedom. That’s very good. In the same way, we should mark all the statues of children with a big red spot over the heart as a reminder that at every moment, somewhere in Palestine, South America or Africa, a child is killed by bullets. People never talk about that!

-- quotes from "Interview with Jean-Marie Le Clézio" by Tirthankar Chanda
source and link: Label France

further readings: excepts
past New York Times reviews:
-- “The Interrogation”
-- “Fever”
-- “The Flood”
-- “Terra Amatar”