If I had not known that Ritournelle de la Faim was written by a nobel laureate 
who had been producing literary work critically acclaimed since 1963, I would say that the novel is the work of a genius in the making. Interspersed with magical moments, especially in its first few pages, it is nonetheless structurally unequal and does not seem to meet its own goal: “I wrote this story in memory of a girl who was, against her will, a twenty year old hero,” claims the author or narrator in a separate epilogue. Yet Ethel does not surprise us as a hero, and her transformation throughout the story suggests devolution rather than progress.
Le Clézio proves his writing mastery when creating the point of view of Ethel as a child. Her transformative view on her environment is an well-dosed mix of endearment, simplicity and acuity. Her relationship with her uncle Soliman, a “giant who can open a door out of any disorder in the world” is wildly complicit while retaining a certain level of silent subtlety – as when Ethel ‘understands’ her uncle wants to leave the park just through the tone of a question, and decides to leave only to please him. It is hard to get at the essence of that tone and what makes it infantile while never losing its intelligence, and that is what makes it exceptional. Perhaps it is the immediate importance taken by the elements, the rain and the sky, perhaps it is the exaggeration of M. Soliman as a character, or perhaps it is a format of steady images, like that of Ethel dragging his uncle across the street in the rain while he holds his hat with his other hand, that reminds us of our own childhood, remembered only in blurry snapshots. Perhaps it is all this together coupled with the simulated rhythms of a thinking child, on one side the stark jets of single ideas – “M. Soliman isn’t interested. M. Soliman has an idea in mind” – and on the other, the long streams of thematic thoughts triggering one another, age leading to size leading to comparison: “Ethel is ten years old, she is small, her head only reaches M. Soliman’s hip”.
If Ethel is an interesting child, she does not grow such an interesting adult. The relationships in her life are shaped in stumps. M. Soliman, the first character to have a meaningful relation with her, dies a little later. We keep hoping, until the very last pages, that something significant will grow between her and Xenia – not that she is not an important character, but Ethel and Xenia’s adolescent friendship is groundwork for a later relationship that never happens. She is more and more estranged from her parents, whom she calls by their first names. Though she shares moments of joy with Laurent, he is no emotional stir; he “talks to himself” in his letters and she is “surprised to feel so little” after reading his missives, perhaps surprised enough to burn the letter without hesitation. Her relationship with him does not transform her. Like M. Soliman’s dream house whose stump turns into an ugly condominium, Ethel’s entourage has a bad habit of turning dry and hopeless. Why? The reasons are uncontrollable – M. Soliman dies, Xenia leaves because of the war, her parents have fight through a doomed, sinking relationship and Laurent is, well, just a bit too British. If Ethel is a hero, the elements that are out of her control make her a hero in vain. When she tries to rescue what’s left of her father’s finances, she “feels like a brave little soldier going up to the battlefield”, only to end up losing it all anyways. What kind of hero is Ethel? Not a particularly inspiring one.
The second half of the narrative is more interesting for its outlook on the war than for Ethel’s development as a character. The story focuses on the individual experience of war, and the great events are left in the background. The details of survival, the changing ways of life, of nourishment and transportation, of emotional fraction, the blurred lines between what is and what is not war are all of great interest. At two moments we feel that the novel transforms the way we think of war and of this war especially. Ethel realizes that “perhaps there had been no war. Only crimes, crimes and criminals, bands out in the country to sack, kill and rape” (191). Ethel gives us a portrait of war as the institutional and historical amalgamation of all the crimes committed between certain dates, and later she realizes that there are no clear temporal limits between states of war and peace for individuals, that “with the noise of engines, the front lights of cars, the dust and the bitter smoke of engines, she felt as if peace had not arrived yet” (178). Later, Ethel walks through Paris in an attempt to understand how land tells the tales of war – if she might find a sign here or there of the extent of crimes committed, of the passage of abnormality. She searches desperately like someone looking for the exact moment when day becomes night, and comes to the understanding that she does not know what she is looking for, that “rivers clean up History.” Her wish to understand war is a wish to understand every single person’s experience of it, every place’s transformation, she would have to
“go everywhere, know each of these places, understand how life started again there, the trees that were planted, the monuments, the inscriptions, but above all see the faces of today, of all who live there, listen to their voices, the shouts, the laughs, the noise of cities built all around, the noise of time passing by…” (203).
If Le Clézio can dazzle us with these passages of great acuity and wisdom, we we keep yearning for Ethel to be more than a perfunctory character in this second half, and to find and the transform the poetic tones of her childhood into the truly heroic – and perhaps inspiring – character that she might have been intended to impersonate.
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