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Fever
In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clezio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. In "The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain", a man with toothache spends the night seeking ways to disown his throbbing jaw; in "Fever", Roch finds his mind transported by sunstroke; and, while in "A Day of Old Age" little Joseph tries to comprehend the physical suffering of a dying old woman. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power.
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
J.M.G. Le Clézio
157 books623 followersJean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, better known as J.M.G. Le Clézio (born 13 April 1940) is a Franco-Mauritian novelist. The author of over forty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
June 2, 2021
Um tédio de morte. Tudo muito sério, muito sofrido, muito aborrecido, muito desprovido de humor.
December 28, 2021
Excellent writing. He was fond of adding notes from adverts, newspaper clippings. Although they were 9 different stories, they all had the same flavour.
April 22, 2016
People lived there, sunk into themselves, caught up in noises and rustlings, without a thought in their heads. They forgot about details. [...] they paid no attention to the faint disturbances that rose up softly, from the furthest depths within them, to remind them who they were. [...] thinking of nothing, suspecting nothing; unaware that time was going by quickly, very quickly, second after second, and that they were drawing imperceptibly closer to nothingness, to death.
*
And yet from this landscape, so beautiful and so powerful, a contrary passion was rising as well, tearing you apart and setting you erect, skywards. The brute strength, heavy as concrete, entered into you and made a mountain of you. Ascending lines planted themselves in your limbs, and you were suddenly imbued with a stirring, direct, architectural intoxication, you positively took off for the upper layers of the atmosphere and went on rising, gorged with oxygen. Facing the rampart, shooting up like an arrow. A longing to grasp everything, to hold everything in your arms. In the silence, in the cold.
*
And yet from this landscape, so beautiful and so powerful, a contrary passion was rising as well, tearing you apart and setting you erect, skywards. The brute strength, heavy as concrete, entered into you and made a mountain of you. Ascending lines planted themselves in your limbs, and you were suddenly imbued with a stirring, direct, architectural intoxication, you positively took off for the upper layers of the atmosphere and went on rising, gorged with oxygen. Facing the rampart, shooting up like an arrow. A longing to grasp everything, to hold everything in your arms. In the silence, in the cold.
July 12, 2022
La verdad abandoné este libro. Solo leí tres cuentos y no pude más. En La fiebre y El día que Beaumont conoció a su dolor, abundan las descripciones mega exageradas y rebundantes que no llevan a ningún lado. Atrás, el tercer cuento, tanto como los primeros dos, es un relato surrealista que nunca logró gancharme.
August 25, 2024
Gostei muito do conto "Martin". O resto, não foi de meu agrado.
May 18, 2016
Não consegui acabar de ler.
Pelos vistos os Nobel da literatura não se dão bem comigo
Pelos vistos os Nobel da literatura não se dão bem comigo
February 19, 2018
Compendio de pequeños relatos donde los estados alterados de sus protagonistas, ya sea por el cansancio, el dolor, la furia o simplemente una alta temperatura, llevan a los protagonistas a un estado de de reflexión.
La premisa no es mala, pero encuentro chocante la manera en como los relatos son narrados. Todo dentro de ellos, los personajes, las descripciones y los sentimientos que se expresan son exaltados de una manera que encuentro exagerada. Es cierto que la fiebre puede llegar a extremos donde uno puede alucinar, o el enojo alterarnos de una manera en la que perdemos el control, pero la manera en como están descritos estos estados alterados la encuentro pretenciosa y artificial. Y todos son iguales, son demasiado intensos para ser tomados en serio y parecen una caricatura de lo que en realidad quieren reflejar. Este libro no fue para mí y en realidad no lo recomiendo a nadie en particular.
La premisa no es mala, pero encuentro chocante la manera en como los relatos son narrados. Todo dentro de ellos, los personajes, las descripciones y los sentimientos que se expresan son exaltados de una manera que encuentro exagerada. Es cierto que la fiebre puede llegar a extremos donde uno puede alucinar, o el enojo alterarnos de una manera en la que perdemos el control, pero la manera en como están descritos estos estados alterados la encuentro pretenciosa y artificial. Y todos son iguales, son demasiado intensos para ser tomados en serio y parecen una caricatura de lo que en realidad quieren reflejar. Este libro no fue para mí y en realidad no lo recomiendo a nadie en particular.
August 8, 2018
What an incredibly gifted writer. Le Clezio's prose is a surreal trip through the notion of sensation and existentialism.
Felt like mescalin but I was looking for a beer.
Felt like mescalin but I was looking for a beer.
January 21, 2021
Interesting, well written butdepressing 9 short tales
Read
October 19, 2021I found the short stories more accessible than "interrogation". The one about toothache in the dark was excellent
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 29, 2024
Intriguing
July 14, 2024
Excellent writing and storytelling
February 10, 2009
If you really want to know, I’d rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing’s done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left.
When a book begins with the above lines in the introduction written by the author you should immediately know that this will not be a book about hope, about the little wonders of life that make you smile and dance around happily while rejoicing about being alive on this planet, or about cuddly little bunnies that go hopping in fields of wildflowers. This is Le Clézio’s second novel and I am amazed he stuck around long enough to write more and ultimately win the Nobel instead of walking to the sea, submerging his little French head in the surf, and drowning himself.
Nine short stories of people who are tired of life, dead within, or just plain dying.
Like the two Le Clézio books I read earlier, this is a book that just goes on and on and on about the earth’s decay, about time and death, about hermetically sealed compartments, and about the overbearing sun...
The sun struck down vertically on his skull and on the ground. One seemed to hear the sound of its shafts, and they drove into the soil and stuck there, upright, making patches of tall, stiff grass. Paoli advanced through them, without parting them, without feeling them; but he heard them fall, the great rays of light, he heard them bursting round his feet with tiny, violent explosions, heavy drops possessed of fantastic speed, machine-gun bullets that had travelled about 150,000,000 kilometres.
The above is from the short story called The Walking Man and it begins by describing water dripping from a rag in the desolate apartment that Paoli lived in; 3 pages devoted to water dripping from a rag. When Paoli gets the rhythm of the dripping water embedded into his head, he leaves the apartment and starts walking to the beat of the drip. He walks for about the remaining 24 pages. That’s what you can expect from Le Clézio’s earlier work; hundreds upon hundreds of words describing the mundane, hundreds upon hundreds of words elevating the simplest scene into a universe where we are but a speck of dust baking in the heat of the sun.
My favorite story was called The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain. Poor Beaumont had a toothache and it tormented him. He seeks ways to disown the pain but he soon becomes obsessed with the abscess and becomes the pain. This was a stressful little read. You felt the urgency of Beaumont to end his pain. I nearly put a gun to my head but then realized it was just my index finger pointing at my temple... and then the sun shot spears of scorching stainless-steel through my windows and I went and had a cold beer.
In A Day of Old Age, Joseph closely watches an old lady die. He wants to understand the pain she’s going through, to see what images death is projecting in her head, to breathe in her death rattle.
From A Day of Old Age... In forty years, or perhaps sooner, these will be words written by a dead man. And in two hundred years, in any case, nothing exists today, nothing of this second, will still be alive. When You’ve read this line, you must turn your eyes away from the mean little scrawl. Breathe, take a strong, deep breath, be alive to the point of ecstasy. Because soon, there won’t be much left of you.
And on that positive note I would just add that the writer of this uplifting piece exceeded his forty years and went on to win the 2008 Nobel Prize. It is a wonder, not his winning, but his living.
When a book begins with the above lines in the introduction written by the author you should immediately know that this will not be a book about hope, about the little wonders of life that make you smile and dance around happily while rejoicing about being alive on this planet, or about cuddly little bunnies that go hopping in fields of wildflowers. This is Le Clézio’s second novel and I am amazed he stuck around long enough to write more and ultimately win the Nobel instead of walking to the sea, submerging his little French head in the surf, and drowning himself.
Nine short stories of people who are tired of life, dead within, or just plain dying.
Like the two Le Clézio books I read earlier, this is a book that just goes on and on and on about the earth’s decay, about time and death, about hermetically sealed compartments, and about the overbearing sun...
The sun struck down vertically on his skull and on the ground. One seemed to hear the sound of its shafts, and they drove into the soil and stuck there, upright, making patches of tall, stiff grass. Paoli advanced through them, without parting them, without feeling them; but he heard them fall, the great rays of light, he heard them bursting round his feet with tiny, violent explosions, heavy drops possessed of fantastic speed, machine-gun bullets that had travelled about 150,000,000 kilometres.
The above is from the short story called The Walking Man and it begins by describing water dripping from a rag in the desolate apartment that Paoli lived in; 3 pages devoted to water dripping from a rag. When Paoli gets the rhythm of the dripping water embedded into his head, he leaves the apartment and starts walking to the beat of the drip. He walks for about the remaining 24 pages. That’s what you can expect from Le Clézio’s earlier work; hundreds upon hundreds of words describing the mundane, hundreds upon hundreds of words elevating the simplest scene into a universe where we are but a speck of dust baking in the heat of the sun.
My favorite story was called The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with His Pain. Poor Beaumont had a toothache and it tormented him. He seeks ways to disown the pain but he soon becomes obsessed with the abscess and becomes the pain. This was a stressful little read. You felt the urgency of Beaumont to end his pain. I nearly put a gun to my head but then realized it was just my index finger pointing at my temple... and then the sun shot spears of scorching stainless-steel through my windows and I went and had a cold beer.
In A Day of Old Age, Joseph closely watches an old lady die. He wants to understand the pain she’s going through, to see what images death is projecting in her head, to breathe in her death rattle.
From A Day of Old Age... In forty years, or perhaps sooner, these will be words written by a dead man. And in two hundred years, in any case, nothing exists today, nothing of this second, will still be alive. When You’ve read this line, you must turn your eyes away from the mean little scrawl. Breathe, take a strong, deep breath, be alive to the point of ecstasy. Because soon, there won’t be much left of you.
And on that positive note I would just add that the writer of this uplifting piece exceeded his forty years and went on to win the 2008 Nobel Prize. It is a wonder, not his winning, but his living.
June 9, 2024
One of those occasional books that changes what you believe is possible in fiction and thus one of the best short story collections I have ever read. Le Clézio's incandescent style is the first notable aspect of his work. It is immensely affecting, melodically and rhythmically, and has a powerful momentum. It is not dissimilar to that of J.G. Ballard in the sense that it seems geometric in itself even when not engaged in some literal or metaphorical geometric analysis of the material under consideration at any time, but it is more philosophical and looser too; ultimately there is a tight control on digressions and tangents but they are held at the end of a long leash.
Or perhaps we can say that the stories are one large remarkable digression and tangent. They are often picaresque or pseudo-picaresque accounts. The characters appear to ramble aimlessly from one situation to another, from one coordinate of spacetime to another, and only their confusion and curiosity remain unchanged along the way. There are four masterpieces among this collection of nines stories. None of them feature a conventional protagonist or anything in the way of orthodox characterization, plot or dialogue. None of them follow the standard patterns of story pacing or development. They are less like other fictions and more like chronicles of subjective experiences.
The title story 'Fever' is a novelette or novella in which the distorted perspectives of a delirium sufferer are shown to be keys to unlocking the distorted nature of reality itself. 'The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with his Pain' is about the telescoping of awareness due to a terrible toothache. 'The Walking Man' is the story of a journey that is spatially insignificant but metaphysically tremendous. 'A Day of Old Age' is about death, life, individuality, the merging of the substances that give us temporary form back into the environment. The last of these contains a nice metafictional touch in which Le Clézio urges the reader to take a break from reading and breathe deeply while appreciating the fact we are still alive, a gesture that shows more consideration for the existence of the reader than most fictive texts.
Of the other five stories I would like to point out that 'The World is Alive' contains no human or animal characters at all. It is the story of a river from its source in the mountains all the way down to the sea. It is more like an essay than a story, an example of nature writing, and yet it is still a story, because this river is the character, a character as valid as any imaginary human being would be, and its journey is the most perfect of narratives because we already know and don't know at the same time what the progression and outcome will be. It is exactly the sort of story that confounds all the advice given by creative writing teachers on creative writing courses, the sort of story that shows there are no rules, there is only ingenuity.
Or perhaps we can say that the stories are one large remarkable digression and tangent. They are often picaresque or pseudo-picaresque accounts. The characters appear to ramble aimlessly from one situation to another, from one coordinate of spacetime to another, and only their confusion and curiosity remain unchanged along the way. There are four masterpieces among this collection of nines stories. None of them feature a conventional protagonist or anything in the way of orthodox characterization, plot or dialogue. None of them follow the standard patterns of story pacing or development. They are less like other fictions and more like chronicles of subjective experiences.
The title story 'Fever' is a novelette or novella in which the distorted perspectives of a delirium sufferer are shown to be keys to unlocking the distorted nature of reality itself. 'The Day Beaumont Became Acquainted with his Pain' is about the telescoping of awareness due to a terrible toothache. 'The Walking Man' is the story of a journey that is spatially insignificant but metaphysically tremendous. 'A Day of Old Age' is about death, life, individuality, the merging of the substances that give us temporary form back into the environment. The last of these contains a nice metafictional touch in which Le Clézio urges the reader to take a break from reading and breathe deeply while appreciating the fact we are still alive, a gesture that shows more consideration for the existence of the reader than most fictive texts.
Of the other five stories I would like to point out that 'The World is Alive' contains no human or animal characters at all. It is the story of a river from its source in the mountains all the way down to the sea. It is more like an essay than a story, an example of nature writing, and yet it is still a story, because this river is the character, a character as valid as any imaginary human being would be, and its journey is the most perfect of narratives because we already know and don't know at the same time what the progression and outcome will be. It is exactly the sort of story that confounds all the advice given by creative writing teachers on creative writing courses, the sort of story that shows there are no rules, there is only ingenuity.
September 17, 2009
As impressed as I was that The Interrogation was published when the author was 23, my admiration is surpassed by the fact that Fever was published when he was 25. As great as The Interrogation was, and despite the fact that I usually don't get that into short stories, I still must say that reading the two side by side would lead one to believe that at least a decade took place between the completion of the two books.
Most of the stories in the collection describe the minimal. Yet, they do so with a, for lack of a better word, feverish and frantic pace so extreme that the telling takes on the same otherworldly quality that the world can take on when a person is in a feverish or hallucinatory state. The few reviews that I have come across seem to focus on how depressing the book is. They aren't wrong per se. My brain feels battered for having read it to such an extent that I can't even imagine how the brain that produced it must have felt. Yet, the quality was so high, the enjoyment was so intense, and the prose was so far beyond what most people are capable of that it is well worth reading.
As with The Interrogation, there was not much in the way of standard plot, yet a few pages on the dripping of water in the middle of the book was more engrossing that a tale with a tragedy a page and a laugh a minute. I would recommend the book to anyone who isn't afraid of what deceptively seems like an ambitious read. While the prose is very highbrow and verbose, the reader flies through the pages propelled by the narrative as if it were a thriller. The difficulty isn't in staying with the book, the difficulty is in putting it down.
Most of the stories in the collection describe the minimal. Yet, they do so with a, for lack of a better word, feverish and frantic pace so extreme that the telling takes on the same otherworldly quality that the world can take on when a person is in a feverish or hallucinatory state. The few reviews that I have come across seem to focus on how depressing the book is. They aren't wrong per se. My brain feels battered for having read it to such an extent that I can't even imagine how the brain that produced it must have felt. Yet, the quality was so high, the enjoyment was so intense, and the prose was so far beyond what most people are capable of that it is well worth reading.
As with The Interrogation, there was not much in the way of standard plot, yet a few pages on the dripping of water in the middle of the book was more engrossing that a tale with a tragedy a page and a laugh a minute. I would recommend the book to anyone who isn't afraid of what deceptively seems like an ambitious read. While the prose is very highbrow and verbose, the reader flies through the pages propelled by the narrative as if it were a thriller. The difficulty isn't in staying with the book, the difficulty is in putting it down.
January 19, 2012
e ne connaissais pas Le Clezio, alors j'ai décidé d'attaquer avec un recueil de nouvelles intitulé "La Fièvre". Ce recueil rassemble des textes décrivant des héros perdant le contrôle de leur corps ou de leur sens. Le Clezio s'attache à une description clinique de leur ressenti face à cette perte de contrôle inhabituelle.
Je n'ai pas réussi à finir ce recueil. J'ai trouvé tout ça lourd, daté, empesé. Cet exercice de style qui aurait pu être passionnant s'avère vain même si le style peut être parfois brillant. J'ai eu l'impression de me retrouver face à un avatar du nouveau roman qui n'aurait pas passé l'épreuve du temps.
Il me faudra beaucoup de temps je pense avant de revenir à Le Clezio.
Je n'ai pas réussi à finir ce recueil. J'ai trouvé tout ça lourd, daté, empesé. Cet exercice de style qui aurait pu être passionnant s'avère vain même si le style peut être parfois brillant. J'ai eu l'impression de me retrouver face à un avatar du nouveau roman qui n'aurait pas passé l'épreuve du temps.
Il me faudra beaucoup de temps je pense avant de revenir à Le Clezio.
January 28, 2019
050713: collection, some are very good and some are less. buried philosophical possibilities in each story, absurd, anguished, such as one man suffering an existential toothache, one story that seems like almost a mission statement for this author, nothing less than- the world is alive. enjoyed this but not as much as his longer work.
February 3, 2014
3.5 stars, read in English. It was quite uneven, some of the short stories were interesting and I even wrote down some quotes {Martin, The World Is Alive}, the majority was annoyingly wordy though. Not my favourite style of writing.
November 7, 2008
Also very depressing start. I will try again later.
February 2, 2010
My first read for Le Clezio. I enjoyed his writing, but I didn't always enjoy this collection. Next time I will try one of his novels proper.
January 23, 2011
I read the first paragraph of the book and I just knew that I had buy it and read the rest of it.
However, the rest of the book was a rather tedious read.
However, the rest of the book was a rather tedious read.
August 25, 2011
I'm completely mesmerised ! Deserves a second read.
January 22, 2018
mad, lonesome, riffing on Sartre's early fiction, meta but real, neurotic but incisive, this is very good, very French and very introvert / existential / nutty
April 4, 2013
Intense, hallucinatory short stories about common experiences, e.g. having a fever. Poetic writing but very hard to get a handle on what was happening.
April 21, 2013
Some stories felt more like creative writing exercises than anything, but his skill is undeniable.
Read
September 19, 2018Well, I didn't finish it, so I can't really rate it. There's some surreal, intriguing imagery and obviously a creative mind at work there, but, at the story level, it just didn't connect with me on any level.
It's hard to say if he's deserving of the Nobel without reading more, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to him again.
It's hard to say if he's deserving of the Nobel without reading more, but I'm not sure if I'll get around to him again.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews