Novels
- Friday, Or the Other Island (1969)
- Friday and Robinson (1972)
- The Erl-King (1972)
- Gemini (1981)
- Gilles and Jeanne (1987)
- The Golden Droplet (1987)
- The Midnight Love Feast (1992)
- The Mirror of Ideas (1998)
Collections
- The Fetishist and Other Stories (1983)
Novellas
- Eleazar, Exodus to the West (2002)
Non fiction
- The Four Wise Men (1982)
- The Wind Spirit (1988)
Novels Book Covers
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Michel Tournier Books Overview
Friday, Or the Other Island
Friday, winner of the 1967 Grand Prix du Roman of the Acad mie Fran aise, is a sly, enchanting retelling of the legend of Robinson Crusoe by the man the New Yorker calls ‘France’s best and probably best known writer.’ Cast away on a tropical island, Michel Tournier’s god fearing Crusoe sets out to tame it, to remake it in the image of the civilization he has left behind. Alone and against incredible odds, he almost succeeds. Then a mulatto named Friday appears and teaches Robinson that there are, after all, better things in life than civilization.
Friday and Robinson
In the evening of September 29, 1759, a cargo ship runs aground and is wrecked in a violent storm. There is only one survivor, a young Englishman travelling to South America to seek his fortune. His name? Robinson Crusoe. This is the ultimate ‘desert island’ story a tale of one man’s struggle to survive on an untamed island. It is a tale of ingenuity and endurance, as Robinson tries to establish himself as ruler of his natural surroundings. The story has been told and retold many times, but here Michel Tournier offers a entirely new version. At its heart is the relationship between Robinson and the Indian he rescues, Friday. The two begin conventionally enough, as master and slave, but the roles are to shift dramatically…
Gemini
Jean and Paul are identical twins. Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean Paul. The mysterious bond between them excludes all others; they speak their own language; they are one perfectly harmonious unit; they are, in all innocence, lovers. For Paul, this unity is paradise, but as they grow up Jean rebels against it. He takes a mistress and deserts his brother, but Paul sets out to follow him in a pilgrimage that leads all around the world, through places that reflect their separation the mirrored halls of Venice, the Zen gardens of Japan, the newly divided city of Berlin. The exquisite love story of Jean Paul is set against the ugliness and pain of human existence. Gemini is a novel of extraordinary proportions, intricate images, and profound thought, in which Michel Tournier tells his fascinating story with an irresistible humor.
The Midnight Love Feast
Yves Oudalle, one time captain of a fishing trawler and still in love with the sea, and Nadege, his wife, no longer get on. At a dinner party to announce their separation, each of the guests tells a story which grows more powerful as the night draws on.
The Mirror of Ideas
If not by nature, then by habit, people tend to match one thing with another man and woman, laughter and tears, sickness and health, fire and water, master and servant thereby accentuating similarities and contrasts and opening a field of relations. In The Mirror of Ideas, Michel Tournier examines these pairs and a host of others to demonstrate how pairing one object or idea with another generates the work of imagination, philosophy, and creative thinking of all kinds. Tournier treats pairs both lowly and exalted moving from fork and spoon, horse and bull, cat and dog, to fear and anguish, poetry and prose, body and soul, being and nothingness. Hardly an exhaustive inventory of traditional pairs, his selection nonetheless opens the door to patterns deeply embedded in culture and civilization, speech and writing, memory and habit. Possessed of both brilliant surfaces and surprising depths, Tournier’s myriad reflections on the mirror of language reveal why his works have generated international attention and acclaim.
Eleazar, Exodus to the West
Michel Tournier’s Eleazar, Exodus to the West is a modern successor to two seemingly disparate myths the biblical adventure of the Exodus and the nineteenth century myth of the American frontier. The setting is 1845. Eleazar, a Protestant minister, leaves his native Ireland with his wife and two children to emigrate to America. Like the Old Testament Moses, with whom Eleazar comes to identify through the course of the novel, Eleazar has committed a justifiable murder and is forced to leave his home. After landing in Virginia, the family travels west toward what Eleazar believes is the Promised Land of California. While in the Colorado desert, however, he experiences a profound epiphany. He understands for the first time how the prophet Moses was tragically torn between fire and water: between the burning bush, with its power to bring him into contact with the voice of Yahweh, and the banal demands of the Hebrew people in exile, who depended on him to touch his stick to the rock and bring forth water. Eleazar, Exodus to the West parallels the lives of the two misfits the Irish minister in the American West and the Hebrew Moses in exile in the desert after leaving Egypt. Tournier sets before us timeless issues and tantalizing questions from our mythological past: Moses’ personality and peculiar relationship with God, fundamental contradictions between the Old and the New Testaments, and our own intimate bond with the eternal symbols of fire and water.
The Four Wise Men
Displaying his characteristic penchant for the macabre, the tender and the comic, Michael Tournier presents the traditional Magi describing their personal odysseys to Bethlehem and audaciously imagines a fourth, ‘the eternal latecomer” whose story of hardship and redemption is the most moving and instructive of all. Prince of Mangalore and son of an Indian maharajah, Taor has tasted an exquisite confection, rachat loukoum, and is so taken by the flavor that he sets out to recover the recipe. His quest takes him across Western Asia and finally lands him in Sodom, where he is imprisoned in a salt mine. There, this fourth wise man learns the recipe from a fellow prisoner, and learns of the existence and meaning of Jesus.
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