Nobel Prize winner at MIT

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

When I wandered online to David R. Godine's site last night (see below), I came across the news that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Literature known as France's "nomad novelist,'' will give a talk ("The Writer and the World: Reflections of an Author") and reading (in English) at MIT on Tuesday, April 28, from 6-8 p.m. in the Stata Center on Vassar Street in Cambridge.

As I wrote at the time of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm last December, Godine is among the American publishers with Le Clézio works in translation. In 1993 Godine published an English translation of "The Prospector," about a privileged young man on the island of Mauritius whose idyllic existence is shattered by the death of his father. In June Godine plans to publish a translation of "Desert," which the Swedish Academy praised for its "magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."