Search Results

“... small consolation). Prickly, the infant protagonist of the sixth story in this collection of 14 by Michel Tournier, would agree. Maleness repels, femaleness attracts him. Papa is grizzled, tobacco-smelling, stiff and, above all, stubbly: rebarbative, in fact. Mama – soft, creamy, sweet-scented, supple Mama – summarises all things nice. Much else in ...”

“... strong in many Islamic cultures. The power of the image. This looks like a subject worthy of Michel Tournier the philosopher novelist, the delicate idea-cruncher, the prestidigitator of the hypercathected concept. It looks like something that deserves to be run carefully through his romanesque (or novel-producing) analytical machine. And it provides ...”

“... of history’s ‘higher cribbers’: Borges, Montaigne, Stevenson, Eliot, Mann and Harold Bloom; Michel Tournier and Alain Robbe-Grillet; pretend pretenders to the throne, Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel; Napoleon’s chef Dunand; and ‘the genitally preoccupied Roman epigrammatist Martial’. I found some of the recipes in The Plagiarist in the ...”

“... Michel Tournier’s Gemini was published in France six years ago under the title of Les Météores, but it arrives in this country, in Anne Carter’s convincing and sometimes virtuosic translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel ...”

“... is an early type of the conte cruel, a genre which developed in France as a special art-form: Michel Tournier still practises it today. The effect of these tales is quite different from that of ‘Mary Postgate’ because there is no personal animus involved – they do but poison in jest. The fantasy may be there, but there is no violence behind ...”

“... it on his return from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of ...”

“... how they saw their own surroundings, and how their children would see them. In his autobiography, Michel Tournier has written about how peculiar it seems to someone who lived through the war to read accounts of it by those who didn’t. But of course for the children of Vichy France there has been more than Graham Swift’s romantic curiosity at stake in ...”

“... the freedom that underlies the existence of others and letting it come into its own.Back in Paris, Michel Tournier and his fellow students at the Sorbonne had much the same experience: One day in the autumn of 1943, a new book appeared to us like a meteor: Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant. There was momentary astonishment, followed by prolonged ...”

“... at Gary’s un-French origins by censuring his verb conjugations, and the avant-garde preferred Michel Butor. But the book sold well – like a lot of Gary’s output it’s said never to have been out of print in France – and Gary did a good job of using the press attention to lodge his public persona in the national consciousness. As a celebrity Gary ...”

“... deported, and murdered en route to Auschwitz. According to Deleuze’s friend the novelist Michel Tournier, Deleuze’s parents ‘created a veritable cult around Georges’, for which Gilles never forgave them. A sickly, asthmatic boy, he grew his nails long because of a skin disease which left his fingertips painful to the touch, and he wore a ...”

“... leap in their careers.’ He had a brief, stormy marriage to the actress Judith Magne, and was Michel Piccoli’s best man at his marriage to Juliette Gréco. He knew how to woo his subjects off and on the page. ‘You are the only one who talked about me as I would have wished,’ the novelist Albert Cohen told him. It was a charmed life, particularly ...”