“I loved La voie des nuages. (...) you’ve managed to achieve something that was absent from your previous books and that I don’t know whether I can express with clarity. Your texts have always had a certain essence, very Baudelairian, much like the master himself says in Little Poems in Prose: “Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and scaccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.” Here, however, your ability to strip language of all lyricism however wonderful it may be — that which Beckett called the dryness of the cement, — which can be the hardest thing for a writer especially in your native language, which has such a strong rhetorical subconscious, demonstrates the strength of your writing. At times it reminded me of the great Lu Xun, who was able to create absolutely poetic prose without the need for almost any flourishes, or perhaps with the greatest one of them all: bareness. To narrate like you do, especially in the part that impressed me the most (Les Sept Sages de la Forêt de Bambous), where you’re capable of suggesting more than what is expressed grammatically and turning your narrative into a sort of poem that still remains a story, is something unusual. Not even those closest to you in your cultural universe have achieved what you have in this text, Le Clézio, I’ve never been so impressed.”