Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave Le : The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts

Le Clezio, a distinguished French writer with 20 novels to his credit, including The Prospector (1993), writes moody and menacing short stories set in a fallen universe. Once a verdant paradise, Le Clezio's world has been brutalized with hideous concrete high-rise projects, heavy traffic, and pollution, and most adults hide in cell-like apartments bathed in television's narcotic blue glow. But the young are restless and reckless, and they pay dearly for their attempts at escape in "The Round," in which two teenage girls race their mopeds through their stodgy town at dangerously high speeds, and in "Ariadne," in which an urban adolescent, reluctant to be cooped up with her unhappy family, becomes prey to a motorcycle gang. Le Clezio is an intensely atmospheric, nearly hallucinatory writer, and in his riveting and eviscerating short stories, dreams turn inexorably into nightmares.