The Interrogation [Paperback]

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.

"The Earth is blue like an orange": the words of a clever poet or of a madman disconnected from reality? J.M.G. Le Clezio explores the legendarily thin line separating the mentally astute from the mentally ill in The Interrogation.

Adam Pollo isn't sure whether he has recently been discharged from a mental institution or from the army. He lives in an abandoned house at the top of a hill, spends his days in a deck-chair by an open window, waiting "without moving, proud of being almost dehumanized," in a state he describes as meditative, watching the shadows of insects and "reconstructing a world of childish terrors." Adam is isolated, but claims he doesn't want to be alone: he wants to "exist with the coefficient 2, or 3, or 4, instead of that infernal coefficient 1." He thinks about and sometimes tries to write to Michele, the woman he met on the beach. Sometimes he follows a dog through the streets. Toward the end of the novel Adam makes a rambling speech to a gathering crowd and later finds himself in an asylum where he's interrogated by students under the disdainful supervision of a psychiatrist.

Although the psychiatrist is quick to attach diagnostic labels to Adam's mental illnesses, the reader is less certain, in part because Adam is so adept at verbal jousting with the students. Adam is disturbed and troubled, but those are traits shared by many who avoid institutionalization. It's clear that Adam doesn't function well in society, equally clear that he doesn't much want to -- his isolation is self-imposed, as evidenced by a letter from his mother -- but in his self-absorbed world, Adam's mind flourishes. Adam finds meaning in random forms of light and shadow, the product of a different way of seeing. This resembles mental illness more than genius, but the novel seems to be asking: who is to say? It is Adam, after all, who calls attention to the poetic phrase "the Earth is blue like an orange," asking why its author isn't regarded as a lunatic. Adam defines life as "a kind of disorder of the consciousness," and despite our ceaseless attempts to impose order on our straying and occasionally irrational thoughts, Adam might be right.

I confess that I found some of the novel's middle passages tiresome, particularly when Le Clezio began playing with the novel's form, changing fonts and lining out text and leaving big blank spaces between brackets. The devices approximate the disorder of Adam's mind, I get it, but after awhile reading disordered thoughts gets to be a lot of work. Other parts of the novel, including the interrogation and Adam's interaction with the students, struck me as brilliant. I would give The Interrogation 4 1/2 stars if I could. Although uneven, the novel is well worth reading for its lyrical prose and biting dialog, as well as its insightful examination of an unusual mind.

An exercise in formal invention from a first time novelist utilizing new approaches to the subject of life,it's randomness,its chaos,its grandeur,its terror.We dispense with plot and character,we delve beneath the layers of convention,the accretions of culture into the philosophising of an extreme nature.Adam Pollo, holed up in a beach house whose owners are away,hoping they don't come back and haul him away; keeps a journal,writes letters to a mystery girlfriend,shamanistically enters into the life of moths,dogs,rats,panthers.He makes journeys to shops,into town or visits the beach or harbour.He spies upon people,sunbathers,beachcombers,receives letters Post Restante from his worried parents who want him to come home.In his interior adventures he discovers ways of being,ways of seeing in his state of exile.He is `not sure whether he has left the army or a mental home'(Le Clezio says in introduction), in a `kind of game or jigsaw-puzzle in the form of a novel'.Le Clezio utilizes techniques of modernism in an experimental and abstract way: we get each chapter starts with a letter of the alphabet,there are quotes from the extracts of novels and newspapers,typographical innovations,including words crossed out.There are Lautreamont flights of lyricism in descriptions of nature,poems, memories of his childhood, the sight of drowned bodies in the harbour, the self interrogation of philosophical speculations: 'Simultaneity is the total annihilation of time and not of movement,an annihilation not necessarily to be conceived as mystical experience,but by a constant exercise of the will to the absolute in abstract reasoning'.He is alienated and his internal dialogues overflow into the public space as he addresses people in the market-place that leads to him being committed for psychiatric observation.The question at the end -is he more sane than his interrogators?This is a richly rewarding novel for the future Nobel laureate,its like a trial run into the future possibilities, mining existential themes it depicts the consciousness of a man trapped between god-like visions and paranoid delusions and sustains what Le Clezio wished for, a'complete fiction' of essential reality.