WPRB Princeton 103.3 FM

Desert Blues, Egyptian Balady, and Romani songs inspired by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio's Le Desert. Considered to be one of his breakthrough novels, Desert is a poetic, historically rich novel that intertwines two timelines: the 1909 migration of nomadic Berbers fleeing colonial violence, and the 1970s struggles of Lalla, a young woman descended from the same people, navigating life in Tangier and Marseille. The novel is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel which documents the slow death of a North African culture. "They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps."