Le Clézio's 'Trois Mexique' Celebrates Three Mexican Literary Icons

Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has published 'Trois Mexique' (Gallimard, 135 pages, €18.50), his eighth work dedicated to Mexico. The book profiles three writers: 17th-century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, novelist Juan Rulfo (author of 'Pedro Páramo'), and historian Luis González y González, pioneer of microhistory. Le Clézio, 86, first visited Mexico in August 1967 and lived with Emberá and Waunana peoples in Panama's Darien forest for four years in the early 1970s. The essay explores each writer's quest for literary modernity, their engagement with silence, and their representation of Mexico's layered cultural heritage—pre-Hispanic, colonial, and independent. Sor Juana's villancicos in indigenous languages are highlighted as a fusion of Aztec poetry and Baroque creation. Rulfo's abrupt silence after his 1955 novel is examined, as is González's similar withdrawal. The book opens with Le Clézio's metaphor of Mexico as a 'three-story' country: prehistoric subsoil, colonial era, and independence since 1910.