Le Procès-verbal

by J.M.G. Le Clézio

«On me reprochera certainement des quantités de choses. D'avoir dormi là, par terre, pendant des jours ; d'avoir sali la maison, dessiné des calmars sur les murs, d'avoir joué au billard. On m'accusera d'avoir coupé des roses dans le jardin, d'avoir bu de la bière en cassant le goulot des bouteilles contre l'appui de la fenêtre : il ne reste presque plus de peinture jaune sur le rebord en bois. J'imagine qu'il va falloir passer sous peu devant un tribunal d'hommes ; je leur laisse ces ordures en guise de testament ; sans orgueil, j'espère qu'on me condamnera à quelque chose, afin que je paye de tout mon corps la faute de vivre...»

Genres: Fiction, France, Nobel Prize, Literature, Classics, Novels, French Literature

314 pages, Pocket Book

First published September 13, 1963

About the author

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, better known as J.M.G. Le Clézio (born 13 April 1940) is a Franco-Mauriciano novelist. The author of over forty works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

To over-describe is to defamiliarize the reader with the thing described. (Conversely, to under-describe can allow the reader more cognitive room to fill in the blanks.) Done well, as here early on, over-description sets the reader squirming. The effect is a little like chalk misapplied to a blackboard. See Russian Formalism. There’s a fine example of the technique early in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, when a painting in a gallery is described. The protagonist here may be mad, so his hyper vigilance to setting, atmosphere, his and others’ bodies, grates even when softened by way of third-person narration. It’s an admirable way to begin.

Adam watched them absentmindedly as though they, their noise and movement, had no logical connection with himself; and every sensation of his overwrought body, which magnified details, fashioned his being into a monstrous object, a compact of pain, in which consciousness of life was merely consciousness of matter through the nerves. (p.14)

Adam has avoided working life, the rat race, it appears, so he might indulge himself in a constant welter of sensory, phenomenological experience. He’s drunk on his sensations. Thus, the use of defamiliarization. It occurs to me that this is very much a young man’s novel, filled with the knowledge gleaned in college, and marked by a shrewd talent that allows the author to place a few of these ideas in juxtaposition, which in turn function as a clever narrative engine. Impressive. Adam’s sensibility is wholly solipsistic. He’s alienated from the social so that he is incapable of giving, so busy is he greedily sucking up bodily sensations. He’s cruel to animals as all true dyed in the wool serial killers are. He’s just ruthlessly fucked a young woman; she hasn’t been seen since; did he kill her? Adam, in short, is a bore, but the prose is not.

The novel reminds me of Lolita in this sense, it’s the story of an obnoxious figure whose prose seeks to be of such overwhelming interest that we excuse, forget, overlook the character’s loathsomeness. Humbert Humbert’s was a libertine, greedy for illicit sexual pleasures, self-satisfactions, for humiliating others as a means ego inflation, and for skirting the law. That’s all here in The Interrogation, though Adam’s greed is for a deep form of internalized experience.

What drives Adam is reflection, lucid meditation. Starting from his own human flesh, from the sum of his present sensations, he annihilates himself by a dual system of multiplication and identification. (p. 154)

As the book crawls to its finish, Adam disappears and the novel fragments into a number of discreet stories: the drowned man, the woman in the photographic negative, etc. Then we flashback to Adam at age 12, and move on to a turgid bit of pataphysics. A favorite sentence: “All the components of the telephone are present in the rhinoceros.” (p. 153) The device of a torn up notebook is used, written in at some point by grownup Adam, thus the text is even further fragmented. Eventually Adam evolves, perhaps inevitably, from squatter and general cynic to ebullient street-corner prophet. There are many ways to go insane on the page. Two of my favorites are Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment and Alberto Moravia’s Contempt. The Interrogation isn’t on that exalted level, but it holds the reader and stays lodged in memory. That is a difficult task for any writer. Recommended.

[Jim Elkins]

One of the Worst Novelists to win the Nobel Prize

After Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize there was a lot of writing about writers who were never awarded the Nobel, and how political the prize has often been. There are also many writers who have received the the prize but haven't stood the test of time, including a number of astonishingly poor choices.

This book, and this author, are irredeemable. If you think this is an expressive conjuring of the mental state of a disturbed young man, if you think this is a fair representation of tortured imagination, you should read Schreber's Memoirs of My Mental Illness, or Artaud, Genet, Bachmann, Gerður Kristný, or Burroughs, or anyone! Read Emil Nolde's memoirs, read something by A.L. Kennedy, read anything!

Le Clezio writes whatever comes into his head at any moment. There are some sustained passages in which he's imagining something from one point of view, as one experience -- there's a chapter about a rat, and one about a dead man washed up on a beach -- but he interrupts himself with random notions, names, and places. He seems to think this is how novels work, and he may also imagine this is how abnormal mental states feel. It is childish, in the bad sense of that word.

And the Nobel Prize: clearly, it is evidence that for some people, this kind of scattered, adventitious, random, opportunistic bricolage is an adequate representation of states of consciousness. Such people have apparently never experienced depths of imagination. It is tremendously sad to think of that.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another one of those Nobel Prize winning writers that hardly anyone has read. I've got to be honest, I hadn't even heard of Le Clézio until he came up in conversation about five years ago: ten years after he received the award. I've always liked it when writers push the boundaries of what a novel can be, even if at times it's a struggle. Here, it's like some beautiful Virginia Woolf-esque stream of consciousness prose has been jabbed with experimental psychiatric medication and beaten around the head by Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus and Georges Simenon. On paper, that actually sounds great!, but I found it had moments that were too garbled and uneven; too strange and bizarre. It is a novel of ideas and randomness that centres on a man, Adam Pollo, an alienated deserter, who could have just come out of a mental institution after being in the army, it's unclear. So, very much the unreliable narrator. He tries to fake his own death for some reason before moving into a villa by the sea and writing to a woman who would eventually join him - we discover he raped her before, but she then goes off with a tourist, Adam gets threatening, and the police go after him. In between his activities include hanging out with soldiers and a dog, walks on the beach, a trip to the zoo where he pisses off a panther, attacking rats, reading, and watching on as a body is pulled from the water. Interestingly, there is a newspaper article which one would take as being important, with the story of two bodies found off the coast of Corsica, but the how and the why, and many other happenings never get any real explanation. Frustrating work, but the experience over all was certainly not a bad one. As a first novel at the age of just twenty-three, where Le Clézio never walks on a well trodden path in regards the narrative style, I admire the effort.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

J.M.G. Le Clezio's The Interrogation begins like a French beatnik novel. We are in a Riviera resort town looking through the eyes of one Adam Pollo, a squatter living in a vacation home. He smokes, reads newspapers and magazines, works on his suntan, and occasionally gets together with his girlfriend Michelle, from whom he borrows money from time to time.

After a while, the relationship goes bad, and Adam becomes more frenzied as the weather changes from summer to winter. He breaks down at one point, ranting at a crowd, until he is picked up and moved to a mental hospital for examination.

Suddenly, the merely phenomenological Adam Pollo we had known before becomes an intellectual familiar with Ruysbroek, the Inca, and a whole slew of mystics and philosophers. This is during an interrogation by a psychiatry professor and his young students, who bring out a showy response from him.

The Interrogation is Le Clezio's first novel, which becomes ever more interesting as we see Adam developing into ... what?

Note to Self: Read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for possible comparison.

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Nobel for Le Clezio makes me think that the Swedish Academy must be like a legislative body – it produces odd compromises that are no one's first choice. My only previous experience with Le Clezio was a rather gauzy commentary on the conquest of Mexico, a topic about which much has already been written, with great specificity. So I approached “the Investigation” with curiosity and a dash of hope, especially since it took the Renaudot Prize. The main character, Adam Pollo, does not know if he has been released from the Army or the mental hospital. Le Clezio settles that point during the narrative: Pollo seems detached from the norms of society, has occasional outbursts, some of them violent. His mind focuses on extraneous minutiae. Near the beginning, Pollo commits what can only be described as rape, but the victim has no reaction. But he seems rootless and detached. There are interesting moments toward the end, when Le Clezio does some interesting things with form, recording a psychiatric evaluation and introducing mock ups of newspapers into the text. But in the end, Pollo and his world seem not so much surreal as deliberately unreal. Perhaps this is all a reflection of Pollo’s confused mind. But the narrative thread is weak to start with and can’t stand that strain. I don’t mind unreliable narrators, but unreliable writers leave me cold.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Initially intoxicating, the writing suffused with a visionary apprehension of the world, like a Van Gogh world everywhere seething and alive and teetering on madness, but then it kind of let me down toward the end as it wrapped itself too neatly up and strove for "significance". And maybe one or two too many lit tricks, but still a powerful book.

[Dirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book aloud from the translation by Daphne Woodward.

In French, the title " procès-verbal" is more accurate and more broadly evocative than 'Interrogation.' A 'procès-verbal' may refer the minutes of a meeting, such as the meeting some psychiatry students hold to question the protagonist in the last third of the book, but it may all so refer to a summary of the facts in a criminal case, which is what the whole book is.

On the surface, this is the story of a mentally disturbed young man who gradually slips from life squatting in a house in a southern French resort town where he is involved in something resembling a relationship with a girl, through progressively more bizarre actions and harangues to confinement in a mental hospital. At least for me, the young man in his self-centered state is initially unattractive. His “girlfriend”– at least she lends him money and is willing to have sex with him – he treats rather badly not only out of indifference and self-preoccupation but also out of a sort of misdirected inner rage. But as his struggles continue he becomes ever more sympathetic and engaging until at the end he is an eloquent spokesman for a view of reality.

The turning point in my feelings about the protagonist is a section where he joins the crowd around the body of a drowned man that has recently been hauled from the sea. There is some really remarkable writing in this part of the book, which portrays in prose appropriate to each subject the reactions of the bystanders, the physical reality of the waterlogged corpse, the highly textured reality of the shale beach, the stereotyped life of the drowned man and his family, and other matters. Writing in this book often shows this sort of flexibility; there is effective writing of many sorts: descriptions of nature, descriptions of mental states, description of animals, and descriptions of the nature of reality from a certain perspective. Part of the novel is epistilatory, consisting of letters written to the girlfriend, if not delivered to her.

What is this perspective? What is his struggle about? Our protagonist is very well educated. He occasionally refers to a number of obscure writers including Manilius, a little-known and difficult Latin poet who wrote about astronomy, the Catholic mystic Jan van Ruysbroek, who inclined towards pantheism, and the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. For me, because his thought intrigues me, Parmenides was the clue. Saying almost anything about Parmenides is a controversial oversimplification (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/par...), but, granting that, Parmenides' subject is the elaboration of the relationship between the unity and diversity of things. This is the protagonist's struggle, to order and elaborate the relationship between diversity and unity in the broadest sense. That is the reason for the different, detailed descriptions of reality from different perspectives. It appears in his view of the pebbly beach, of the diversity of the crowd looking at the drowned man, in the process of the breakdown of the drowned man's body, which is devolving into components but is still a single thing, in his identification with animals in zoo, is what he is struggling with when his haranguing the crowd with a speech that eventually gets him committed, is what he is trying to tell the students about, and to tell them that understanding the unity in diversity is more important than understanding whether he is mad or not.

[Margot McGovern]

If you weren't having an existential crisis when you start, you will be when you finish.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A character that might as well have been a cousin of Camus' 'The Stranger' goes hypersentive to everything that goes on in hi world; crazy in other words.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kennt Ihr die Filme aus dem Spätwerk von Fellini, nicht die lebhaften frühen, sondern eher Filme, wie - sagen wir mal - die "Schule der Frauen" Irgendwie schwankt man lange Zeit, ob das ein geniales Meisterwerk ist oder nur zielloses Geschwafel. Das beginnt schon am Anfang, wo man die Handlung nicht richtig erfassen kann und einem alles ziemlich absurd vorkommt aber dann wird man doch irgendwie in dem Film gesogen, die herausragende Kameraführung, eine ungewöhnliche Kulisse oder ein herausragender Schauspieler - sagen wir Marcelo Mastroianni - halten einen in poetischer Stimmung gebannt. Aber es bleibt immer dieser Gedanke im Kopf, dass das alles Blödsinn ist und die gute Kameraführung, der große Schauspieler oder die interessanten Kostüme nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen können, dass das Skript derartig schlecht ist, dass der beste Regisseur der Welt sich die Zähne hätte ausbeißen können. Doch irgendwie bleibt man dabei und erst wenn der Abspann läuft, ist man sich sicher, dass alles ein Reinfall war.

So in etwa ist "Das Protokoll".

Ich schätze - im Gegensatz zu den meisten Rezensenten hier - Le Clézio und finde, dass er mit diesem Roman ein absolut atypisches Erstlingswerk verfasst hat. Es ist - auch in der Übersetzung - oft sprachgewaltig und gleichzeitig poetisch, vielmehr als seine späteren Romane, die ihm den Nobelpreis eingebracht haben. Im Gegensatz zu seinen späteren Romanen hat es - für ein Erstlingswerk eher ungewöhnlich - keine autobiographischen Elemente, insbesondere fehlt der für Le Clézio typische Mauritiusbezug. Hier und da werden interessante philosophische Gedanken aufgetischt. Einige der von Kafka inspirierten Szenen - der Protagonist denkt sich in eine Ratte, die er dann tötet - und einige der existenzialistischen Szenen - Strandszenen, die Camus "Fremden" paraphrasieren - sind wirklich stark. Dennoch bleibt der Eindruck, dass alles Brilliante nur Kulisse ist, für eine drittklassige Coming-of-Age Story. Dies zeigt sich spätestens beim völlig missratenen Schluss im Irrenhaus.

[Andrew]

So this was apparently the thing that turned the French literary establishment onto a young Le Clezio. Which, to a certain degree, makes sense, it's the sort of thing the French literary establishment likes, which is to say its form is quasi-experimental, even if its content is dully predictable, it takes an ironic attitude, but you're not sure what this ironic attitude is toward (and if you have to ask, you're clearly not worthy of it), and things happen with the same stochasticity that Godard employed in Pierrot le Fou.

Urgh. I quite liked Le Clezio's Desert. But it's shit like this that makes me resent the '60s generation even more. The wacky sensibilities of the time have aged horribly, and they've stoked the fires of late-stage capitalism ever since.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was their human memory that gave them a fellow-feeling even without love, and made them dread the long, lonely journey over the abyss even more than death or pain. This would go on until the day when – in a month, a week, or less – one of them would refer to the incident for the very last time.

[Victor Morosoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superbe. Un récit poignant d'un homme qui avait fait trop de confiance en ce monde, un monde qu'il voulait simple et flou. Par l'intermédiare d'Adam Pollo, Le Clézio fait le portrait d'une société qui n'a plus de patience ni de compréhension pour les idéalistes, les chercheurs de beauté et de sens. 4,6/5

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visionary Madness

J. M. G. Le Clézio, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2008, sprang to international acclaim in 1963 with this visionary novel, published when he was only 23. Fragmented, enigmatic, and obsessive, it is utterly different from his more recent masterpieces such as Onitsha and Wandering Star. And yet how could one not be drawn to an author who opens with a self-deprecating preface in which he apologizes for the book in hand, and promises to do better next time, perhaps with something in the manner of Conan Doyle?! There is a lightness and humor about the entire book, no matter how abstruse it may get in its philosophy, that kept me reading eagerly and with a smile.

The principal character, Adam Pollo, is an educated man of about 30 whom we see squatting in an empty house above a French seaside town, making occasional forays for "fags, beer, chocolate, stuff to eat" and to take a look around. He is unsure whether he has deserted from the army or escaped from a mental hospital. He writes obsessively in a notebook in the form of letters to Michèle, a young woman who visits him early in the book, despite the fact that he virtually raped her some time before. He follows a black dog around the town. He gets into meaningless conversations with strangers, or overhears scraps of dialogue and has them pullulate in his mind. But most of the time he thinks, with a visionary intensity that is extraordinary.

A friend remarked that the isolated young man in the seaside town may be a reflection of the title character in Camus' The Stranger (1942). I myself picked up echoes of the nouveau roman movement of the 1950s in the occasional exhaustive listing of physical objects. The Interrogation indeed owes a lot to the French avant-garde literature that preceded it, but unlike Camus' protagonist who cannot feel, Adam feels too much. He has an extraordinary power to penetrate the objects and life around him, involving himself totally in the self-immolation of insects sizzling in his candle-flame, or seeing the sun as:

…an immense golden spider, its rays covering the sky like tentacles, some twisting, others forming a huge W, clinging to projections in the ground, to every escarpment, at fixed points. All the other tentacles were undulating slowly, lazily, dividing into branches, separating into countless ramifications, splitting open and immediately closing up again, waving to and fro like seaweed.

Adam's vision, like the author's, is that of a writer. In the middle of the book, he joins a crowd around the body of a drowned man who has been fished from the sea. He goes on to imagine the conversation of the other bystanders: "And of course (since he who writes is shaping a destiny for himself), they little by little become one with those who drowned the chap." This leads to a string of other disconnected stories about people we never see. Later still, he receives a letter from his mother begging him to come back home; she too has made up a narrative about her son in order to contain and control him, or come to grips with his defection. We all live by stories, but stories can also unmake and destroy us. Fragments of novels, newspapers, poems, and printed signs litter the novel like debris. In one chapter, Adam goes from café to café searching for Michèle, only to end up in lists of places from a gazetteer or names from a book index:

It was among them that he should have hunted. Then he'd have found everything, including Michèle seated at dawn in a deck-chair, cold and wet with dew, shivering amid these interwoven forces.

In the end, Adam's tendency to see every tiny piece of his environment as a part of the entire universe—and also as part of the totality of history, past, present, and future—reduces him, as an individual, to nothing. He begins to harangue bystanders on the promenade and is arrested and hospitalized. There, he is interviewed by a group of medical students (the Interrogation of the title), but they can do little to penetrate his isolation and completeness. He is alone. He is content.

[Robert Wechsler]

There’s a lot to admire about this novel. But LC’s protagonist gets increasingly annoying. He’s a complete loser or lunatic, or both, who wanders around, has a sort of girlfriend (and a sort of dogfriend), and that’s pretty much it. The pace is like a slow French film, but with little dialogue, and the dialogue is pseudo-meaningful in that 50s French way. Thus although singular, it also feels much the same thing. I stopped halfway through.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

real raw stuff, the guys first book so he really lets some goofy metaphors rip. sorry i havent beenr eading much lately i figured out how to play super nintendo rpgs on my phone so ive been a shit lately.

[Birgit · Rating 3 out of 5]

sprachlich war es gut und anfangs war ich auch wirklich überzeugt davon aber dann ist die Handlung immer weniger und komischer geworden und das um das es laut klappentext geht wird auf einer Seite einmal erwähnt und das Ende war sowieso ganz komisch

[Karenina (Nina Ruthström) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2008 års Nobelpristagare i litteratur debuterade som romanförfattare 1963 med den här i mitt tycke oerhört knepiga boken. Den handlar om Adam Pollo som med sitt namn för tanken till mänsklighetens idiotiska sidor men också till en sinnessjuk man. Adam vill inte smutsa ner sina händer med guld däremot vill han vara ensam med sina snurriga funderingar om existensen och andra abstraktioner och därför uppehåller han sig i ett tomt hus vid stranden i Nice. Huset är inte hans och det är den första märkligheten i en väldigt lång rad dito. Den här romanen prövar sin läsares självförtroende och tålamod.

Jag känner mig som en korkskalle och det är aldrig roligt. Långa och många är lässtunderna ihop med J.M.G. Le Clèzio (f. 1940) då jag i princip inte fattar någonting. Adam har dåligt grepp om verkligheten, han vet inte ens om det är natt eller dag. Berättarperspektivet är tredjeperson men det är ingen hjälp, förrän mot slutet då vi får tillgång till ett brev skrivet av Adams mor. Äntligen kan jag andas ut när jag inser att det är inte jag som förlorat förmågan att läsa och begripa text, det är författaren som spelar mig ett spratt. Det var i och för sig lite kul känner jag nu så här i efterhand.

”Men det var ingen mening i alla dessa ord, alla dessa yttranden, som blandas med varandra. Ni var alla män och kvinnor, och jag hade aldrig förr känt lika starkt i hur hög grad ni representerade ett enda släkte. Helt plötsligt skulle jag velat fly till myrorna och lära mig lika mycket om dem som jag visste om er.””

Rapport om Adam har jämförts med Sartres Äcklet och visst känner jag igen begrepp och tankegångar från existentialisterna. Adams tankenötter handlar om filosofi, ontologi, antropomorfism, alienation med mera men den här rappakaljan som dessutom samsas med Adams anteckningar och brev, tidningssidor, bruksanvisningar, tomma parenteser, överstruken text och upplysningar i stil med ”klockan är fem minuter i tjugofem” ger mig faktiskt nästan ingenting.

[Ametista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le parole odorano di terra, sole, delle polvere di una casa abbandonata, di vegetazione arsa dal sole, di animale in putrefazione, di iodio.
C'è un susseguirsi di immagini che sfumano, cambiano colore, si appannano, si trasformano in deliro, riflessione, anarchia.

"Il mare è rotondo, biancastro, merlato e rigido come un blocco di pietra, a 6000 piedi di profondità, e tuttavia, osservandolo bene, c'è qualcosa, indipendentemente dal sole che sorge, una specie di piccolo grumo di materia, un difetto che illumina, che è in funzione, che scarabocchia il suo centro. E' così, perchè se mi allontano un pò dalla lampadina elettrica, la vedo, quella stellina che somiglia a un ragno bianco, si dibatte, galleggia, rimane lontana, vive sopra il paesaggio nero del mondo, e cade eterna davanti a milioni di finestre, milioni di incisioni, milioni di cesellature, miliardi di scanalature, sola come un astro che non morirà mai dei suoi perpetui suicidi, perchè è già morto in sé, e sepolto a tergo di un bronzo cupo."

[Jesse K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure if anyone is going to be swayed by my saying this, but either way: Read This! Seriously.

I know that the Nobel committee are a bunch of stodgy pretentious American hating bastards, but in this instance, they really got it right. There's not much that I can actually say about the book because there isn't a great deal that occurs, but never has nothing happening been described so perfectly. It's not a nothing happens in the "Seinfeld sense" either. It's more of a nothing happens in the dude spends 10 pages killing a rat, 5 pages describing a room, 20 pages following a dog that ultimately fornicates in a store, and so forth.

A 23 year old writing a publishable book in general is amazing. A 23 year old publishing one About (nearly) Nothing that has more nuance and depth than 99.999% of what is out there while managing to impart amazing truths at a breakneck speed is simply astonishing.

All the same. Seriously: Read This!

[Alan Catlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

THis is a pretentious quasi experimental novel done better by other writers of his generation. Not without interest in first hundred pages but sags under the weight of it's smug, conflated narritive vocue and technique. I sincerely hope his books gets better as his career progresses considering he won the Nobel for Literature.

[Sharon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious and confusing, Le Clezio jumps from thought to thought occasionally adding philosophical jargon that leaves you disoriented. For a Nobel winner, I only hope it's because of a poor French to English translation.

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Curious. Can't really say more than that. I'm used to Le Clezio wandering off extensively on descriptions, but not usually so psychologically internal/philosophical as this was.

[Zier Mensch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clezio offers an interesting insight in the world of Adam Polio, a man without any recollection of his past. Adam lives on a deserted house on the top of a hill and spends his days on the beach, following dogs, investigating the death of a white rat or strolling through town without a plan whatsoever.

I had some trouble in following the general line of the story, and still have questions remaining; Was Michele real and did he kill her? Why was Adam arrested? Did someone kill the white rat? But question are to be expected when you morph into the mind of a madman. I did enjoy the figurative description of objects and scenery in the book. I’m a huge fan of the use of insects to describe common objects and Celzio is a true master in this craft.

So at the end of this journey, I would totally recommend anyone to read this book.

Favourite quote: ‘You’re doubly disqualified for living: in the first place you’re a rat in a man’s world, among men’s houses and traps and guns and rat-poisson. And in the second place you’re a white rat in a country where rats are generally black. So you’re absurd, and that’s an extra reason.’

[Francis Barton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a BTEC Albert Camus' Outsider, a good read but not nearly rational enough, falters off towards the end and leaves one with many more questions than answers

[moi, k.y.a. · Rating 5 out of 5]

kitaba başladım, sonra bir devam etmedim sonra yeniden başladım. bu sefer hızlıca bitti ama beni de bitirdi. muhtemelen birkaç yüz defa daha okuyacağım, onlardan birinde yorum kesin yazarım.

[Felix]

Den här gillade jag inte alls

[J J J · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Laurens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dit experimentele werk was een stuk filosofischer en beschouwelijker dan ik verwacht had. Le Clézio verraste me en eerlijk gezegd zat het erg dicht tegen een vijf sterren-rating aan.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book and fell a sleep numerous times while trying to read it. Although I appreciate the fine line between mysticism and craziness with which author tries to get us to see through Adam Pollo's eyes, I thought the way it was done was droll so I give this book a 1.5 stars.

The book is about what happens to a man who spends to much time with himself cut off from society. His mind begins to create things in lieu of reality. Adam fears the outside world and the people and things they represent. He tries to separate himself from everyday life in order to take everything he sees in. He likes to passively experience life as a watcher.

Adam is a deserter of the military and date raped a friend named Michele. Even though he raped her, Michele is the only connection he has to the outside world including gossip and money.

He raised artificial problems and is indecisive. He is overwhelmed by small details of everyday life and he recreates a fictional war due to the lack of external stimuli. He vacillates between hallucinations and clarity in seeing minutiae that other people miss. He has a negative inkling that something bad will happen to him like death. He makes an interesting observation in that both time and existence contain both the finite and the infinite. For time, it can be divided into seconds but at the same time can reach into infinity. Likewise, existence can be divided into packets of ideas but are also capable of replicating in perpetuity. When he meditates, he becomes one with nature and dies feeling what it is like to decompose to distinct pockets of the self. It sounds to me, he describes being one with the universe through the vividness of his interactions with nature.

Adam makes himself into an animal seeing the world through the eyes of a dog instead of empathizing with humans. In a drowned man, Adam finds himself seeing himself as a freshly caught fish and the fishermen as monsters who takes the life of the fish.

He is squatting in someone else's home and has no direction in his life. He is thinking of various ways to occupy himself while staying aloof from any human interaction. In his unfocused state, Adam is preoccupied by his own imaginations of his violent death.

It seems that Adam sixties has faith on the society to take action that eclipses that of any one individual. Adam plays with being infinite by mediating and obliterating the self therefore becoming nothing and everything @ the same time.

Adam Pollo is a crazy person who obsesses on an unifying principle of everything in one moment and the next is obsesses with details of everything. He is destroying his stalking Michele while squatting in other people's homes. Again, Adam has a sensation with being one with the cosmos as every atom in his body comingles with the surrounding atoms as well as our creation of technology. Whereas Adam's mother is trying to make her son normal, he is different in the way he is; perhaps this is the reason he ran away from home. His difference in trying to find a unifying theme in humanity is crippling him in his daily living. He eventually became manic and disrupt the order of things.

When he started crazily speaking in public, he got institutionalized in a mental hospital. In an interview with students, it came out that Adam likes to be alone and left his parents home to squat in a house on the hill in order to commune with nature because he wants to feel superior to nature. The psychiatrist diagnosed him with Bipolar Disorder type I with psychotic delirium. While Julienne initially thought that Adam was sane, he recounted a story from his youth of a fellow student who wanted to be unified with God by studying his opposite the Devil and eventually get to God but he died in the process when he was in his Devil phase. He explains that it does not make a difference whether the person was made up or was him since everyone experience is his own.

Adam tries to explain mysticism in a way that goes beyond the boundaries of analytical explanation which he fails. After trying to make people run away by calling what they are doing to him BS, he is finally alone in his insane asylum where he can contemplate the "mystical unities of life".