When the Nobel committee announced that it was awarding its 2008 prize in literature to JMG le Clézio, a great cry of "who?" went up in the English-speaking world. Ah well - we are insular, and there is no law that says we have to have read, or even be vaguely familiar with, Nobel laureates. Have you read any Aleixandre? Reymont? Cela? Mommsen?
One person who might have had his memory jogged was Martin Amis, who as a young man reviewed Le Clézio's novel War, and found it "such a torment to read that one yearns for the kind of nouveau-roman pranking whereby (say) the final 150 pages are left blank in order to symbolise the void of late capitalism". Amis has always been suspicious of formal experimentation in fiction (to the point where he is very down on Samuel Beckett, sadly), so one wonders what he would have made of certain parts of Terra Amata, first published in 1968, such as the chapter called "Saying Incomprehensible Words": "Woolikanok mana bori ocklakokok. Zane prestil zani wang don bang." (Et cetera, but only for two and a half pages.) Or the previous chapter, where the book's central character, Chancelade, goes to a café with his girlfriend Mina and they communicate only in sign language: "C: Open hand profile little finger down. Closed hand thumb crosswise. Closed hand thumb up. Hand profile index pointing up. Closed hand thumb and little finger up." (Mina's reply is in similar form, but I don't think I need to reproduce it here. The scene goes on for five pages.)
Now, you can go in two directions here. You can throw up your hands in despair at what you might consider such silliness (and it is true that, were the scene in the café to have been filmed, it would look like the most appalling piece of irritating whimsy, like the ball-less tennis match in Blow-Up); or you could say: here are two approaches to the limitations of language as represented on the page. Sign language actually makes sense to a lot of people; maybe it would do us good to be reminded that there are other ways of communication. And as for the incomprehensible words, you could reflect that Le Clézio grew up in Mauritius and Nigeria, where he might have been intrigued by overhearing native languages. And after all, he was only a young man (27) when Terra Amata was published.
Actually, after the late 1970s, Le Clézio more or less gave up these kinds of games in his writing and became a more conventional novelist; such controversy as has attended his Nobel laureateship in France has concentrated on the fact that he is now not experimental enough. "From 1980 on, he has written bestsellers," said Professor Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, and one can imagine that "bestseller" is a pretty strong insult in French wars of words.
I doubt that Terra Amata will be a bestseller in this country, but it has its charms. (Unaided, incidentally, by its stupid cover. Penguin seems on a mission to do ghastly covers these days. Why?) The story is that of Chancelade, from childhood to death; he sees the world in minute detail and ... er ... He talks with a girl his own age (12) after a swim and has a sort of rudimentary fumble with her. His father dies. He experiences this with a kind of furious blankness. He goes on a drive with his wife "in a region that resembled hell". The book begins with the words "You've opened the book at this page. You've turned over two or three pages, glancing idly at the title, the name of the author, the publisher," and so on. I remember when Italo Calvino did the same kind of thing 12 years later in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller ... I lost my patience and didn't read him for years afterwards; my loss.
One cannot extrapolate from this one book the characteristics of Le Clézio's entire oeuvre (which is bipartite anyway, and extends to nearly 40 books). But from what I gather he is fond of the Martian school of looking at the world - there is a not unpleasing naivety at work here. And you may find that the formal games he plays are, in fact, relaxing: they're funnier than you might think.