Introducing Le Clézio

Two first-rate articles on Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which will enable you to answer cocktail-party questions about him with a knowing air. In a tartly opinionated piece, Stephen Schwartz relates the selection of Le Clézio to last year’s crowning of Doris Lessing, another writer whose best work belongs to an earlier age. Richard B. Woodward supplies an overview of Le Clézio’s entire career, a neat primer that leaves you satisfied to learn about the French novelist through these two articles.