Le Procès-Verbal is the first 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".

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:
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. A writer at ilxor.com wrote that

Award(s)

• Written when Le Clézio was 23, this novel was shortlisted for the prix Goncourt
  Prix Goncourt
  The Prix Goncourt is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year"...
  
  .
• Received the prix Renaudot
  Prix Renaudot
  The Prix Théophraste-Renaudot or Prix Renaudot is a French literary award which was created in 1926 by ten art critics awaiting the results of the deliberation of the jury of the Prix Goncourt....
  
  in 1963.
• Unsuccessful in the Prix Formentor.

Publication history

Seven editions published between 1988 and 2004 in 4 languages and held by 766 libraries worldwide.