There is a grim timeliness in the republication of Wandering Star coinciding with Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Le Clezio’s novel is a moving account of the intersecting destinies of two teenage girls following the proclamation of the state of Israel: Esther, a Holocaust survivor and immigrant to the new Jewish state, and Njema, a Palestinian who is displaced by the partition of her homeland. The desperate battle for this territory is described by a young Israeli soldier in the novel as the last war, the war that will secure the Jews’ possession of Eretz Yisrael. But Jewish settlement entails Palestinian expulsion and 60 years later the war continues.

Wandering Star belongs to Le Clezio’s second phase as a writer, when he embraced relatively conventional modes of storytelling complete with familiar devices such as characters, settings and plots.

The novel’s dedication – “To the captured children” – reflects a concern with those caught up in conflict and in following the twin histories of Esther and Njema, Le Clezio returns to the problem of innocent victims he raised in War: “Is there - and this is the question, the real question – is there one girl, just one, whether she be called Bea or Eva or Djema, who has not experienced the war?”

Wandering Star covers almost 40 years (1943-1982) and ranges from Europe to the Middle East to Canada and back again. By far the longest part is devoted to Esther’s experiences before escaping to Israel, first in the French alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vesubie under the relatively benign occupation of the Fourth Italian Army and then, following the Italian surrender and withdrawal, her flight across the mountains into Italy.

Esther’s responsiveness to the beauty of the landscape is bound up with her sexual awakening under the competing attentions of two boys. The resulting narrative is highly charged with phenomenological and metaphysical awareness, sometimes to the point of overkill.

Having said that, one of the most powerful qualities of the novel is the sense Le Clezio creates of the human connection to place and the anguish of exile and dispossession. “Does not the sun shine for us all?” asks one of the refugees in the novel. “Does not the land belong to everyone?” Persecuted European Jews like Esther are sustained in their ordeal by the Hebrew Book of the Beginning with its promise of a covenanted land, but in Palestinian mythology the same landscape is their God-given paradise.

In chronicling the parallel sufferings of Jews and Arabs, Le Clezio gives us a sadly topical retelling of what he calls elsewhere “the greatest, most ancient of all quests: of a habitat”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service