Searching for the Golden

by

Nicki Leone

The picture on the cover of the English language edition of The Prospector by J.M.G. Le Clezio (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008) is from Paul Gauguin's The Bathers—one of the painter’s iconic scenes of an idyllic primitive life on a tropical island, unsullied by modern civilization. It seems, on the surface, to be the perfect, obvious illustration for a story about a young man trying to return to a long lost innocence in an island paradise.

But it’s wrong.

The person speaking to us in The Prospector—the only person who speaks to us—is Alexis L’Etang, the son an unsuccessful French planter on the island of Mauritius—an island best known as the only home of the long-extinct Dodo. Just how unsuccessful, Alexis (“Ali”) is only peripherally aware. Like most children he and his sister Laure pay little attention to the worries of the adults in their lives except to note when they seem sad, or happy, or melancholy. And if the moments of melancholy seem to be growing more frequent, well they still fail to darken the childhood paradise of Ali and Laure—their Garden of Eden that is the plantation house and grounds at Boucan; the rising slopes of the forest-covered mountains that are the backbone of this volcanic island, and the surrounding sugar cane fields that lead down to the warm salty Indian sea. The children grew, Alexis remarks, “like savages,” forever wandering and rarely to be coaxed indoors. There is even a tree of good and evil in this Eden, an ancient chalta tree (a kind of evergreen tree that can grow up to 80 feet high and bears fruits like apples) that Ali and his sister would climb until they could see from the topmost branches the swell of the sea beyond the valley.

A natural dreamer, Ali’s father has several implausible schemes to rescue his family from financial ruin. One idea is to find the long lost buried treasure rumored to have been hidden somewhere on the Mascarene islands by a legendary pirate called “The Unknown Corsair.” The father’s study is awash in papers and maps from old ships’ logs and notations on star charts and out of date almanacs. Alexis likes to sit next to his father and repeat the names of the constellations in the sky. It is one of the few pieces of practical knowledge his father will leave him.

The other scheme involves bringing electricity to the island—and Ali’s father goes so far as to have a huge generator imported from a distant country (at great expense) only to have it arrive and sit on the wooden docks of the tiny fishing port, a gleaming vision of modernization utterly purposeless without the railways, roads and power cables it needs to be of any use. Electricity, it seems, is just as unlikely as buried treasure.

The problem with dreams is that they are so easily smashed. All it takes is one epic typhoon to uproot the trees in the garden and send them smashing through the walls of the house. To lift and twist the old pier underneath the new generator and tilt it into the shallow bay, half buried in mud. Nature has decided to kick the family out of Eden.

Ali spends the rest of the book trying to get back in. Dreams may be smashed, after all, but childhood memories are eternally engraved upon us. After a dismal period spent working as a clerk for a malevolent uncle, while his family lives in poverty in a tiny house “so far away from the sea, there was no real life,” and his father slips into a despair that eventually kills him, Ali decides to take up the quest for the lost treasure of the Unknown Corsair. It is not that he wants to rebuild the family fortune, exactly, but that he wants to rebuild the family legacy that had been lost with the house at Boucan. He wants, in effect, to return to those beautiful days of his childhood.

Leaving his frail, hopeless mother and his dark-eyed, bitter sister to fend for themselves, Ali books passage on a cargo ship that hops from island to island in the Mascarene archipelago. He’s aiming for the island of Rodrigues—which he thinks the most likely place to find the pirate treasure. But mostly, he just needs to be away from his disappointed hopes, at sea. It will be eight years and one world war before he sees his family again.

This, then, is the story: Boy leaves home in search of treasure. He eventually returns, but “home” is no longer what he remembers. And yet despite the fact that Ali’s journey involves storms and sea voyages, treasure hunts and surviving Ypres and the Battle of Somme, the story is almost equally one of internal voyages as it is external adventure. It is one of those books where even when apparently nothing happens it seems like everything has happened. Where long years seem packed into tiny moments of epiphany; an account of a walk to the beach is just as fraught as an account of a typhoon sweeping over the island. A description of slaughtering sea turtles for dinner as horrific as walking through a field of battle piled with the bloated corpses of dead horses. A man thrown into a furnace during a labor riot and a girl grilling fish on a beach both carry a kind of shattering, bright clarity. Perhaps because the voice is almost entirely in the present tense, it makes even the smallest moments seem immediate and vivid, and the smallest actions weighted with intensity—as if things could fly off into unknown directions at any point, since the future is as unknown and mysterious to Ali as he is telling his story, as it is to us in our own lives.

Added to this intensity, this relentless claim of the immediate present on the reader, is the author’s beautiful, painterly language. Even in translation it is gorgeous in a way that almost hurts the eyes. Despite this being a tale of a man in search of a lost Eden, the story is ill-represented by the muddy colors of the Gauguin painting on the cover. Think instead of Albert Bierstadt and the painters of the Hudson School with their eyes always trained on the farthest horizons and their obsession about light glancing off trees and cliffs, luminism:

When the moon was full, I slid out of bed without a sound, careful not to make the worm-eaten floor creak. But I knew Laure was not asleep; I knew her eyes were open in the dark and that she was holding her breath. I scaled the window ledge and pushed at the wooden shutters, and then I was outside, in the night. The garden was bathed in white moonlight; it shone on the tops of the trees, swaying noisily in the wind, and I could make out the dark masses of rhododendrons and hibiscus. With a beating heart I walked down the lane that went toward the hills, where the fallow land began. A big chalta tree, which Laure called the tree of good and evil, stood very close to the crumbling wall; I climbed onto its highest branches so that I could see the sea over the treetops and the expanse of cane. The moon rolled between the clouds, throwing out splinters of light. Then suddenly, over the foliage and to the left of the Tourelle de Tamarin, I saw it: a great black slab alight with shining, sparkling dots. Did I really see it, did I really hear it? The sea was inside my head, and when I closed my eyes I saw and heard it best, clearly perceiving each wave as it crashed onto the reef and then came together again to unfurl on the shore.

The language alone, then, is enough to ensnare and captivate the reader. One feels trapped in one of those landscape paintings. Although in the case of The Prospector, the “landscape” is really a seascape. The sea, not the land, is the thing that Ali seems to forever be drawn towards. Every ship he boards is the Argo, (that boat that took Jason to his golden fleece), every shore he steps onto is a possible new Eden.  Ali seems to always be facing into the salt spray:

I keep an eye on the wind and the waves, and when it feels as if both are getting too strong I yield to them by turning the wheel.  I don’t think I have every felt as strong, or as free. Standing on the burning deck, my toes spread for a better grip, I can feel  the powerful surge of water under the helm and hull. I can feel the vibrations of the waves as they hit the prow and the gusts of wind in the sails. I have never experienced anything like it. It obliterates everything else—the world, time—and I am surrounded only by the future. My future is sea, wind, sky, and light.

The steady thrum of waves crashing on sandy shores and against the prows of ships in the background throughout the story makes the title of the book, at least in English, something of a misnomer. In French, the book is called Le chercheur d’or, which might also be translated in several ways as “One who seeks for gold,” “gold digger,” “Searcher for gold.” A prospector, in fact, although that term in English evokes images of grizzled old men digging tunnels into rocks, creaking mine shafts and muddy streams and long hours spent peering at rocks. Ali’s prospecting is rather different. He’s searching for signs on a treasure map. His eyes are usually fixed on landmarks on the horizon, on the angle of the constellations that rise in the Southern sky over some key point on a mountain peak. He is looking for old mooring rings, symbols carved into cliff faces, and evidence of a long dead pirate’s idea of safe harbor. Ali spends as much time watching tides as he does boring holes. Fishing for octopus with a local Manaf girl called Ouma, and lying in the warm sand telling her stories about the pirate, unconcerned that he has yet to find any gold while he can watch the white sand dry to glittering frost on her black skin. He often loses track of days, even weeks. But he never loses track of the sea.

I will leave it to readers to discover whether Ali ever finds the pirate’s secret hiding place. Whether he reunites with his sister Laure; whether he takes Ouma’s hand and leads her away from the valley that may hold the Unknown Corsair’s treasure. And anyone who knows how quest stories usually go will be able to guess whether he ever is able to get back to some version of his childhood Eden. But the journey Ali takes, oh the journey—it is a beautiful, a golden thing.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Prospector by J.M.G. Le Clezio, translated by Carol Marks (David R. Godine, 2008) 

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.