Le Procès-Verbal
Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
| File:TheInterrogation.jpg
First UK edition
|
|
| Author | J. M. G. Le Clézio |
|---|---|
| Original title | Le Procès-Verbal |
| Translator | Daphne Woodward |
| Cover artist | Jonathan Nicholl |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton (UK) Atheneum (US) |
|
Publication date
|
1963 |
|
Published in English
|
1964 |
| OCLC | 27088925 |
| Followed by | Le Jour où Beaumont fit connaissance avec sa douleur |
Le Procès-Verbal (English title: The Interrogation) is the debut novel of French Nobel laureate writer J. M. G. Le Clézio, about a troubled man named Adam Pollo who "struggles to contextualize what he sees" and "to negotiate often disturbing ideas while simultaneously navigating through, for him, life’s absurdity and emptiness".[1]
Subject
The novel is about Adam Pollo, a loner man who had been marginalized from society. His long hair and his beard make him appear a beggar. Pollo is a former student who suffers from amnesia. He does not know whether he was perhaps a deserter from the army or if he has escaped from a psyschiatric ward. Le Clézio wrote:
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
[He] was trying to remember something pertaining to what happened ten years ago: maybe a phrase, maybe a tell-tale sign from the army, maybe a name or a place which would indicate just when it occurred and waiting, waiting (thinking, thinking) to come up with where it might have happened.[2]
He breaks into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals and as briefly as his scant purchases (of cigarettes, biscuits, or even beer) require. Soon, lack of human contact affects him like a drug and he experiences other modes of being: through a dog's eye or a rat's.. states of heightened consciousness which build up into a terrifying world of glaring hallucinatory experience. Then Adam addresses a small crowd in the town. His unnerving rhetoric ends in his arrest and commitment to an asylum. And there the interrogation begins.
Award(s)
- Written when Le Clézio was 23, this novel was shortlisted for the prix Goncourt.
- Received the prix Renaudot in 1963.
- Unsuccessful in the Prix Formentor.[3]
Publication history
Seven editions published between 1988 and 2004 in 4 languages and held by 766 libraries worldwide.[4]
