A funny guy, this J. M. G. Le Clézio, starting with his name. Though British writers often use a packet of liminal initials, French writers don’t. Can you imagine Sartre calling himself J.-P.? True, Jean-Marie Gustave may be a bit top-heavy, but why not, for instance, just plain Gustave? It was good enough for Flaubert, after all.

But nothing about Le Clézio is like anybody else. Born in 1940 and still active, he has written over forty books of every kind, including some for children. With The Interrogation, at the age of twenty-three, he won the prestigious Prix Renaudot; with Désert, at forty, the French Academy’s Grand Prix Paul Morand; at sixty-eight, for his oeuvre, the Nobel Prize.

Consider next his peculiar ancestry and citizenship. Both his parents’ forebears came from Brittany, a breeder of sturdy stock. In 1798, an ancestor went into exile with his family to the island of Mauritius, which from 1598 to 1710 was Dutch; from 1715 to 1810, French; and British from 1814 to 1992, when it became an independent republic.

Born in Nice, Le Clézio has dual citizenship—French and Mauritanian—and calls Mauritius his “little Fatherland,” which he keeps revisiting for short stays. He has a home there, another in Nice—which makes sense—and a third in Albuquerque—which does not. It may have to do with his second wife, Jemia, who is Moroccan.

Le Clézio is a passionate traveler, and has written several travel books. Sometimes he has even