The shorter, which begins and ends the book, is specifically set in 1909–1910 and later 1912, and tells of the wanderings of North African desert tribes chased from their lands by French colonial invaders, mostly as observed by a small boy, Nour.

This work contained images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasting with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrantsLe Clezio received the Académie française's Grand Prix Paul Morand in 1980 for Désert, a novel that revealed a move towards a more expansive and lyrical style.

The second narrative follows Lalla, a beautiful, fearless, young Moroccan girl who lands in an intimidating Marseilles, where she endures abuse and hardship before being taken up by a fashion photographer.

As in Poisson d'or (1997), the story of a young girl's odyssey from Morocco to Los Angeles, Le Clezio's imaginative empathy is put to good effect.

Impoverished and ragged in Le Clezio's tale, they are nevertheless set apart by their attire: they wear deep blue flowing robes and veils, and where the dye has rubbed off, their skin also becomes blue-tinted.

Le Clezio's characters are, as in ancient myths, endowed with a powerful religious quality, to be understood in the sense of religio (Latin, a "linking back").

That a microcosm inhabits each protagonist suggests the presence of a whole intelligible and unintelligible world which enables the individual to live not only outside of temporal time but also in an expandable space of his or her own manufacture.

Le Clezio's world of transparencies in this regard follows ancient mythic patterns: the individual, gradually removed from circumscribed and limited frames of reference, is plunged into a collective experience – a kind of theophany .The protagonist, Lalla, appears to be not Algerian at all, as the bio claims, but from Río de Oro, i.e. Western Sahara (described ... as South Morocco).