Le Procès-Verbal

The Interrogation

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".

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] 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.

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.

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