saare_snowqueen, so I had been looking forward to reaching it.I was very impressed. Le Clézio tells the story of Esther, a Jewish girl displaced from France over the Alps to Italy and eventually to Israel in the mid-1940s; her story briefly touches on that of Nejda, a Palestinian girl who becomes a refugee as a result of the 1948 conflict. The book is beautifully expressive of both the geographical landscapes of the Alps and Palestine, and of the psychological landscape of displacement, homelessness, and building new ties. I did wish we had learned more about what happens to Nejda in the end, and was a bit disappointed that the last few chapters were about Esther's life decades later. But the pluses outweigh the minuses. I am still hoping for an English translation of Le Clézio's Désert, which is about the Western Sahara.
