The fiction of French Mauritian author J.M.G. Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, has always focused on the need to overcome barriers both personal and political, as in his novel Wandering Star, in which a Jewish girl and a Palestinian girl briefly befriend one another in the aftermath of World War II. Borders and other hurdles are at the center of the eight stories in On the Wrong Side, a marvelous collection translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan. One of the more personal hurdles appears in the subsection "Maureez Samson," in which a young girl living on Rodrigues Island off the coast of Mauritius endures a hard life with an abusive stepmother and, later, mistreatment at a convent, until her gift for singing leads to the possibility of escape.
With his spare prose and unsentimental approach, Le Clézio creates indelible portraits of powerless people, many of them children. In "La Pichancha," set at the Mexico border, young people try to cross to the U.S. through a pipe after "the gringos open the valves to clean the sewers." In "A Luminous Path," two children escape a Peruvian camp in the hope of finding safer accommodation. And in "Hanne," two brothers in war-torn Lebanon meet a girl who is deaf and does not speak, but who shares their desire to escape.
Le Clézio memorably highlights the inequities pervasive in underrepresented societies. Grim but hopeful, On the Wrong Side is an excellent introduction to the work of this distinctively sympathetic writer. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer