Michel Tournier

Friday, winner of the 1967 Grand Prix du Roman of the Academie Francaise, 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.

When we talk of marriage counseling we think immediately of the extreme cases, of threats to seek divorce, of couples in violent disputes who frequently come to blows, Paul Tournier states. But there are many other couples whose marriages are no less a failure. They live side by side, without hurting one another, but poles apart, because of no real understanding of one another. According to Tournier, the ability to understand each other is what counts in working out marital happiness together. With wisdom and warmth, Tournier suggests ways to achieve this understanding.

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.