Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals and as briefly as his scanty purchases - cigarettes, biscuits, beer - permit. 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 arrest and removal to an asylum. And there the interrogation begins . . .

With this stunning debut novel Le Clezio was acclaimed as the most exciting figure to appear on the French literary scene since the death of Camus. The Interrogation still holds the power to grip and astonish today.