michel tournier

I shall call you Sunday.

Friday by Michel Tournier

October 23, 2019 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is a retelling of Robinson Crusoe by the French writer Michel Tournier, who I read earlier in the year for his anti-Nazi novel, The Ogre. This novel also won various French literary prizes. This retelling does a few things that I found really interesting and satisfying. It is NOT a retelling of the novel from Friday’s point of view. Those kinds of novels are out there by now, and Michel Tournier just isn’t that kind of post-colonial writer. Instead, this novel switches from the narrow first […]

Happiness? that entails comfort, organization, a constructed stability altogether foreign to me.

The Ogre (The Erl-King) by Michel Tournier

January 11, 2019 by vel veeter 2 Comments

I learned about this novel from two different sources: one, it won a big French literary prize–the Prix Goncourt–which helped me to generate a list of 20th century French writing I might want to check out, and two, another novel by Tournier was placed on Le Monde’s top 100 books of all time, which is not limited to French writing and contains some really interesting choices. This novel is a series of different voices, documents, and narratives that tell of “The Ogre,” Abel Tiffauges, who […]

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