User:Stadtpark/Le Procès-Verbal

Le Procès-Verbal or The Interrogation is the first novel of 2008 Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio.

Fist novel by author
His remarkable first book will soon be published all over the world and much more will be said.Like his hero, Le Clézio is full of promise, but Le Clézio lacks the discipline and will that might have forged a style and purpose. Le Clézio was only 23 when the book was published hsome reviewers opined that "anything can happen".

Subject
The novel is about Adam Pollo.Adam Pollo is a loner and marginalized out from society. His long hair and his beard make people think he is a beggar. Adam Pollo is an former student who suffers from amnesia does not know whether or not he was ever a deserter from the army or if he had scaped from a psyschiatric ward.According the dust jactet of the edition published in English : A very solitary young man, Adam Pollo, perhaps the first man, perhaps the last, has a very remarkable interior adventure. Le Clézio wrote: "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 occured and waiting ,waiting (think ,think) come up with where it might have happened.He breaks into an an empty seaside villa .He visits the town at rare intervals and as briefly as his scanty purchases (of cigarettes or of biscuits or even beer) permit. 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 arrest and removal to an asylum. And there the interrogation begins . . . ilxor.com wrote that he Interrogation still holds the power to grip and astonish today.

Roman Jeu?
This novel, according to its author, belongs to the category of roman-jeu or roman-puzzle, a total fiction aimed at setting up reverberations in the reader's mind. According to John Sturrock of the Times Literary suppliment puzzle and reverberate it certainly does.

Analysis
The storyline of the book is more than likely to be a myth without distinct delineations. Le Clézio concentrates and he discovers ways of being, ways of seeing.Le Clézio writes as this thoughts enter into animals, into a tree.... Adam Pollo has no business, no distractions; Adam Pollo is at the complete disposal of life. All of life, that is, except the society of his own species — and so the Interrogation ends.

Comparisons with other works
"This is the next phase after the 'the new novel,'" wrote the critics. Kafka they said; a direct descendant of Joyce, they said. Beckett they said. Like nothing else, they said. One hundred thousand Frenchmen bought it. They said it was strange and beautiful. Finally the real voice of the young, said the critics. "I like J. D. Salinger," said Mr. Le Clézio, and that was all he said.

Award(s)

 * Written when Le Clézio was 23, this novel was shortlisted for the prix Goncourt.
 * The Goncourt jury was locked five to five until its president used his double vote to give the prize to the older candidate.The Goncourt jury was locked five to five until its president used his double vote to give the prize to the older candidate.


 * Received the prix Renaudot in 1963.
 * "J.M.G. Le Clézio, revelation of the literary year" ran the headline of the Paris Express after last year's prizes had been awarded.
 * Ten minutes after the Goncourt jury decided the Renaudot jury elected the candidate they thought they might lose to the other prize.
 * Most of the literary sections ran their prize news putting the Renaudot first, in order to feature the twenty-three-year-old discovery that was rocking Paris literary circles.
 * Unsuccessful in the Prix Formentor.

How Simon & Schuster got publishing rights to Second Edition
Leon Neyfakh noted that the rights director at |Gallimard (which publishes Le Clezio's books in French) was recently charged with a task of finding an American publisher for Le Clézio works.However the rights director at |Éditions Gallimardnevertheless prefered to keep the works of Le Clezio in English with the publisheing firm [[Simon & Schuster. David Rosenthal (the president of Simon & Schuster personally made the agreement to publish..

Reviews
willful aimlessness -- but surprising
 * 1) Reviewer Stanley Kauffmann of the The New York Review of Books
 * 2) Reviewer:Leon S. Roudiez for the New York Times Book Review wrote that here is a very good although uneven first novel, written by a Frenchman  and well translated into British English (1964-18-10)}}
 * 3) The magazine time noted that The Interrogation has intense visual strength and might easily be transcribed into a New Wave movie by some current master of the jolting, hand-held camera. The reviewer noted also that The Interrogation lacks human warmth, and ends as another pale variation of the modish French anti-novel and came to the conclusion that The Interrogation truly a tale of tedium.
 * 4) Reviewer John Sturrock of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) wrote that The Interrogation has little rational development, but reads like a very intelligent collection of random ideas and even styles...The Interrogation is extremely ambitious and deliberately naive by turns; there are exotic moments of a sort of Lautreamont mysticism together with careful descriptions of totally irrelevant details, like a Martini sign in the street.
 * 5) John Sturrock  also wrote in the The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) 2 that the Interrogation still does not add up to a book; it is more like a dazzling ray of samples of the books he might one day write.
 * 6) there is an online review of The Interrogation in the complete review where the author of the review mentions that Le Clézio, only twenty-three when he wrote this book (which became a bestseller and won the prix Renaudot), offers a two-page author's note at the beginning of the work, trying his best to both deflate expectations as well as then suggesting how his novel should be read .Their  Assessment:B :
 * 1) Nathaniel Otting of the kenyonreview noted that at one  reading,a person guided the reviewer to John Taylor’s Paths to Contemporary French Literature

Translation
And the hawk-eyed Jessa Crispin of Bookslut was taken aback by the jacket copy Simon and Schuster have provided for the Amerian re-issue of Le Clézio's The Interrogation, where, she noted, "it seems someone ran the original press materials in French through an internet translation programme (Babelfish) and called it a day".

Publication history
7 editions published between 1988 and 2004 in 4 languages and held by 766 libraries worldwide

First French language Edition
First published in French in 1963.

Second French language Edition
was re-published in French.

Second English Edition
The Interrogation (Le Procès-Verbal) was first published by Atheneum,New York, but since this edition is now out of print Simon & Schuster,Adult Publishing Group;New York have re-published "The Interrogation" in English