The generosity of a glance

We are witnessing the best Le Clézio. Not one that bothers us sometimes in the anecdote but the great novelist with powerful imagination, empathy to the fertile and deep look at the human condition in our globalized century.
These two short novels in one book deal basically with the same subject: learning of adult life and assumed through a painful quest for identity.
To define these texts Le Clézio refers to Anglo-Saxon kind of "novella", the model would be to find in Joseph Conrad. But it is not that form, Conrad is in the atmosphere of the first text, reading of "Storm" I thought of "Almayer's Folly", the spell is the same.
This first "novella" is set in a Korean island or women diving in apnea to pick abalone on the seabed. Guilt gnawed a former war journalist, who spent time in prison for attending a gang rape without reacting, returns to the island to be confronted with his own mystery, perhaps to die. The encounter of a young orphan girl father and love he will gradually arouse it will bring it back to life, while the girl will have to cross the despair of the impossible love and give up the substitution of paternal love.
In the second, "A woman without identity" a girl born in Africa of a French father learns by chance that his stepmother who does not hate his mother. Psychological distress occurring is causing a living hell until a camp of people relegated to the sidelines in the Paris suburbs. A police raid and deported to his country led him to return to work in the clinic that he was born ...
While not enjoying the unity of place with high power of suggestion "Storm" the second "novella" is also involved and touching.
Throughout these two works Le Clézio's writing by the rate of the inner life of his characters, making exasperated when the girls "crack", panting and almost visionary in the tragic moments (drowning, rape, fire) more relaxed, contemplative or at other times. His approach is always of great delicacy in the expression of the sensitivity of the girls (apparently "subjects" of choice for him).
At a time when it is fashionable to praise aging writers who aspire to the rest of consciousness and celebrate insignificance, the Nobel Prize in Literature 2008 was, to him, a mind alert to the torments of the soul human and hardness of certain conditions of existence.