La Ronde

“The world for which Le Clézio has been drawing up the record — precisely since Le Procès-verbal, that is, some fifteen books — and into which he once again leads us today through nine short stories, is remarkable for owing nothing to the ornaments of the past. In architectural terms, one might call it bare concrete (…) Le Clézio adopts a spare, austere style; his sentences take on the color of the setting: a powdery grayness, relieved only by the yellow of streetlamps or of a dog’s eyes. This does not prevent the light from changing hour by hour and, not content merely to dazzle, enveloping bodies with a striking materiality” (Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, in Le Monde, 7 May 1982).