This volume deals with Le Clézio's work as a whole and attempts to show how the author infuses a poetic dimension into the novel genre and thereby presents the human confrontation with the outside world with a revitalised intensity. Having analysed his unconventional treatment of the characteristics specific to the novel genre (plot, character, references to space and time), the book establishes the poetic qualities of an author who presents man through his relationship with matter, and who describes primordiality with a rhythm and a system of metaphors that extends the sensory.