Ailleurs (French for "Elsewhere") reads like a meandering conversation where Le Clézio gets to talk about his childhood, his dreams, where he prefers to do his writing as well as aviation and how he escapes from the everyday.[1]
Some of the themes expanded in these interviews are:
Why he was that kind of a child who would prefer to stay in a cabin somewhere off of the coast of Africa to write.
He was also a teenager who believed his destiny was to be found in comic strips.
Why Le Clézio was a (human) being not like other beings; how he was preoccupied with meditation and (day)dreaming.
Le Clézio claiming never to have been either a cheap nor a false populist.
Le Clézio on bearing no resentment or any desire to get revenge.
According to the publisher, the interviews lead to a book which is " an opus on thinking and on poetry" and which uses "broad strokes using mythological colors to tell his story". The storyline of this book is definitely what the French call " Ailleurs" meaning somewhere else.[2]
Broadcast
This book includes interviews previously broadcast on France Culture in 1988 as part of a radio-programme "A voix nue".
^Sollers, Philippe. "Le Clézio par Sollers" (in French). Retrieved 2008-11-17. Un grand-père chercheur d'or, un père parlant anglais, une mère née à Milly-la-Forêt, un enfant – lui – qui préfère, au large des côtes d'Afrique, rester dans sa cabine pour écrire, un adolescent qui croit d'abord que sa vocation est la bande dessinée, un corps pas comme les autres habité par la méditation et le rêve, rien d'étroit, de mesquin, de faussement populiste, pas de ressentiment, d'esprit de vengeance, une ouverture sur la pensée et la poésie, l'histoire large, les couleurs du mythe. Oui, il est décidément d'ailleurs.
