Both these novels, one by a Peruvian [Mario Vargas-LLosa] now working in Paris, the other by a young Anglo-Frenchman, were concerned in the final stages of the judging for the Prix Formentor last May, La Ciudad y los Perros narrowly failing to win the prize. Read together they make an encouraging comparison, for they have, happily, absolutely nothing in common except their talent, which is surely as it should be with any literary prize of this sort.

For a first novel La Cuidad y los Perros is impressively dense and sure-footed . . . . this is a very bright beginning indeed.

The same applies equally to Le Proces-Verbal, unsuccessful in the Prix Formentor but since awarded the Prix Renaudot in France. This novel, according to its author, belongs to the category of roman-jeu or roman-puzzle, a total fiction aimed at setting up reverberations in the reader's mind. Puzzle and reverberate it certainly does.

The hero comes from a long line of symbolic recluses and is called Adam Pollo. Nothing is known about him for certain; indeed his past is deliberately ambiguous—is he an army deserter or has he escaped from a psychiatric ward? These are the only two alternatives we are offered. Certain it is that he ends up in an asylum, after society has taken its revenge on him for his peculiar way of life. For Pollo lives alone on a hill, having moved uninvited into an unoccupied house, and his only human contact is with a girl called Michele, with whom he makes rather abrupt love or discusses metaphysics as they lie on a billiard table.

The novel has little rational development, but reads like a very intelligent collection of random ideas and even styles. There are some fetching typographical innovations, including words crossed out and what purports to be a page of a newspaper bound into the text at one point. It is extremely ambitious and deliberately naive by turns; there are exotic moments of a sort of Lautreamont mysticism together with careful descriptions of totally irrelevant details, like a Martini sign in the street. Adam Pollo himself suffers, if that is the right word, from an extase materialiste. and the dividing lines between himself and other organisms are correspondingly weak. At different times he identifies himself with a dog, a drowned man, even rocks.

The most hopeful of M. Le Clezio's several moods and manners is his own form of lucid lyricism, which suggests that he may one day produce something quite remarkable. Meanwhile this is an attractively playful and intelligent beginning.

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