The problem with "Desert" is not that its author is European or that he won the Nobel, but that it is a truly dreadful book, a dull and dimly plotted fable based in one of the West's oldest and most self-serving myths, that we are the locus of all corruption and that purity lies outside.

“Desert” is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. Weaving together two stories that span the 20th century, Le Clézio tells of the last days of the Tuareg, the desert warriors known as the blue men, who are being driven from their ancestral lands in North Africa by the French colonial army and “the new order,” and in counterpoint, the travails of a later generation trapped in the projects and shantytowns of Tangier and Marseille.