LITERATURE AND WAR IN LE CLÉZIO’S WANDERING STAR

Dëfrim Saliu, Shejnaze Ajdini-Murtezi, Besa Saliu

Abstract

Literature and war have, since antiquity, maintained a close relationship; the first work that describes war is Homer’s The Iliad. At a more perfect level, in the early Middle Ages we encounter The Song of Roland which marks the birth of a new literary era during the longest period of human history, the Middle Ages. As a very important experience in writing a novel or literary work, war not only provides a stately material to writers, it also impels them to ask about the warrior, his motivations and passions. War literature oscillates between two opposing poles, on the one hand is its cause, heroism, and the exaltation of war, the other being the horrors and humiliations that war brings. The whole story of the Wandering Star begins in the southern Alps in the summer of 1943 in a small village in the inner circle of Nice, where all Jewish families that were persecuted by the Italian fascists and German Nazis were gathered. Le Clézio had borrowed the subject of the novel (the oldest part of this story) from the memories of his mother, that reappeared to her in 1982, during the Beirut bombings. The author finished the novel in 1987, but he delayed the publication to avoid a direct link to the then-current events of the 1990s in the Middle East.

Pages: 71-79