The Giants

by J.M.G. Le Clézio

Book Overview

Upon an immense stretch of flat ground at the mouth of a river bathed in sunlight rises Hyperpolis. It stands there, surrounded by its four asphalt car-parks, to condemn us - a huge enveloping supermarket. Each of us will see ourselves reflected in the characters who move mindlessly about Hyperpolis, but The Giants is a call to rebellion. This bold and inventive novel is the work of a tremendously talented writer and both an intoxicating and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099530481
• ISBN13: 9780099530480
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: CCV
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Do you remember? Do you remember?

The first time you read Celine's 'Journey To The End of the Night'? Or Lautreamont's 'Maldoror'? Rimbaud's 'A Season In Hell'? Aragon's 'Paris Peasant'? Michaux' poems? Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'?(and on and on...) Do you remember the convulsions, the palpitations, the cold sweat? Do you remember the breathless sprints across the page, the tremors in your fingertips, the throb in your temples as the sentences hurtled and crashed against your skull? It was during those moments that you realised what literature could do- you found that you could wield words like weapons, that you could make sentences spit like vipers. Those books taught you the fineries of linguistic pugilism- you learned to thrust and parry with the pen, to sharpen the edges of words, to use punctuation as projectiles. Strolling through these august armouries, you developed a taste for malice, you eagerly enlisted yourself in their cause. The war had already begun, and you were in the midst of it- either capitulate to language, or turn it against itself. Together, we would fire fusillades at the frontiers of consciousness, we would swarm the policemen of the mind, we would snap the chain of command; with poetry, we would catapult ourselves over the thresholds, we would break through to the other side. This is my first Le Clezio novel, but I can wholeheartedly say that this book, as a call to insurrection, belongs alongside the abovementioned. The highly compact, compressed style recalls the likes of Bataille and Artaud (the words press, nay, BULGE against the margins of the page), while the subject matter will be familiar to initiates of Baudrillard. In many respects, the closest parallels I can draw are to JG Ballard and Burroughs' exemplary essays in "The Adding Machine"/the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, though I am tempted to say that Le Clezio is more gifted than either of those luminaries. While he shares Burroughs' taste for the histrionic, he exhibits little of his relish for the sordid. Also, while both writers employ a style characterised by ellipses and discontinuities (I've always suspected that in Burroughs' case this owed itself to an inability to sustain a coherent narrative), Le Clezio's transitions feel a lot less jarring, making "The Giants" a compulsively compelling book. To put it in another way- imagine if Baudelaire had written 'Spleen of Paris' while strolling about Jean-Luc Godard's 'Alphaville'. Indeed, the white-knuckled desperation/urgency of the novel recalls Godard's finest films (Two or Three Things I Know About Her and its Ponge-esque musings on commodity fetish, Week End's Swiftian grotesquerie, Tout Va Bien's supermarket sequences). Like Godard, there is something sincerely, unabashedly tender, even sentimental, beneath all of the furious diatribe-Le Clezio is resolutely unwilling to relinquish his faith in Rimbaud's Christmas. Perhaps this disarming naivete is the greatest merit of the book- for all its virtuousity, there is no tricker