Ritournelle De La Faim, Paperback Book, By: J M G Le Clezio

My mother, when she told me about the Bolero premiere, said her emotion, the cries, the bravos and the whistles, the uproar. In the same room, somewhere, was a young man she has never met, Claude Levi-Strauss. Like him, long after, my mother confided in me that this music had changed her life. Now I understand why. I know what this repeated, drilled phrase, imposed by rhythm and crescendo, meant for his generation. The Bolero is not a musical piece like any other. It is a prophecy. He tells the story of anger, of hunger. When it ends in violence, the silence that follows is terrible for the stunned survivors. I wrote this story in memory of a young girl who was a heroine in spite of herself at the age of twenty.