Book Review: "Terra Amata" by J.M.G Clézio

From the prologue of this novel I knew I was absolutely in love with it. The beginning is just so powerful, leading you into this person’s life from the very beginning (not in a Tristram Shandy way but you get what I mean). From his youth to growing up and growing old, this book is a testament to a fictional character’s life that feels at most times, all too real. Clezio really outdid himself with this one and I want to share with you the various things that made this book as amazing as it was to read. It was not just the character and what he did in his days of being within the text, instead it was also the way the character spoke directly to the reader with first and second person in conversation. It felt like I was reading something that was addressed to me in order to make me feel something. And it did. It made me feel like I was in a world where every problem, every issue and every moment of human suffering was something to be built upon and directed towards a better few moments of happiness. It showed me how to be happy knowing that one day, every single thing you did both mattered and, in the grand scale, did not matter. It showed me to appreciate what 209 pages I might have before I too must write my epilogue. It’s mind-blowing.

Just check this out. The book opens by directly addressing what the reader is doing with the book, as if to put us in the same time and place as the author and as if a conversation is happening:

“You’ve opened the book at this page. You’ve turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author, the publisher, and perhaps you’ve looked for the phrase in quotation marks that’s nearly always to be found at the beginning of novels because it looks well and the author covers himself to a certain extent by referring to someone more important than he is…” (p.1)

Each and every thing is a new discovery. Kind of like you’re reading Chapter 11 of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” where the Monster makes his first discovery of the world in all its glory. The book opens with all the landscape descriptions and discovery someone like me (who is a huge fan of descriptive writing) could want. Throughout the book, it turns more introspective, making references to physical and mental states as comparatives. Prose changes to poetry, poetry back to prose and into speech marks and through many different states of language - because that is how we live, right? We never really live in just one state of language. We live through all of them.

One of my favourite parts of the book is called “Or Asking Indiscreet Questions” and it begins on page 196 of the Penguin Modern Classics translation by Barbara Bray. It is a series of questions to the reader in a like mind of David Foster Wallace about whether we are really enjoying reading this or are we just trying to mend some emotional state - like we are trying to make ourselves feel better, or not feel guilty etc. “What is truth? What is passion? What is freedom?” (p.197) are three questions in succession that stuck out to me as descriptive but short, odd but natural and most importantly, human and existential. David Foster Wallace meets Soren Kierkegaard, they have a conversation and these are definitely three questions that would be asked at the meeting and definitely in quick, almost rapid-fire succession as if they all required one answer.

I cannot stress how much I enjoyed this book and if you read all the way to the end, you will encounter his death which, by all promises, is probably the most beautifully written passage in the entire text. From questions to the reader, to descriptive landscapes, love affairs and broken belief systems, this book seems to understand the very essence of what it means to be alive and not in a cliché sense. To be alive is to ask questions and to be alive is also to be able to die. It is a journey of pure magic, but also one that is far too real to resist.