Tonight I spent the evening with my siblings at the 92nd Street Y for a talk with Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, famous since he was 22, and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik as part of this year's PEN World Voices Festival, which has just begun. It was truly extraordinary in that Le Clézio is an absolutely fascinating, wholly original thinker and yet his comments were meaningful because of his intimated understanding of the myriad shared complexities of human nature (not to mention the sensual rhythm of alienation). We cannot avoid what we are. Near the end, someone in the audience asked him what the landscape of his mind was like, and we laughed at how inane that sounded, and then he answered that it is like the North Pole: icy, with no plants, empty, under a blinding sun. Not that he's been there.
Previously: A Reason to Read: The Interrogation.
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