Le Proces-Verbal Book

One of the Worst Novelists to win the Nobel Prize

After Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize there has been a lot of writing about writers who were never awarded the Nobel, and about how political the prize has often been. It's also illuminating to consider writers will have gotten the prize but haven't stood the test of time. There have been some astonishingly poor choices over the years.

This book, and this author, are irredeemably poor. 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, or Genet, 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 is 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 continuously interrupts himself with random notions, names, places, and ideas. He seems to think this is how novels work, and he may also think 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 real depths of imagination. It is tremendously sad to think of that.