Word: tournier
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...Virgin Blue,” Chevalier’s under-recognized literary debut—published in Britain in 1997 but not released in this country until 2003—tells the dual narratives of 16th-century Isabelle Tournier and her modern-day descendant, Boston-bred Ella Turner, two women who are linked by a haunting family secret...
...right National Front must actually find quite appealing. But less ideological traditionalists are now rallying against the Milquetoast meddlers, denouncing the notion of tampering with the song that rang through the torchlit streets of revolutionary France as nothing short of traitorous. Sure, the Marseillaise "is ridiculous," concedes novelist Michel Tournier, "but we should leave it alone because, like old furniture, it gains in value over the years...
...effect on the majority of 1789 commemorations. Celebrations large and small, local and national, will attract record numbers of tourists to France. If these do not mark a true festival of reconciliation, the French can still take pride in the passion they have for their history. In Lyons, Jacques Tournier, the descendant of a water carrier who was guillotined in 1793, recalls that his grandmother refused to walk past the place in the market where the execution machine stood. "Now I too avoid that spot out of respect for my ancestors," Tournier says. Jacques Delmas, a lawyer from Reims...
Like a good Hegelian, Tournier presents his thesis and antithesis. But he is also a good Jungian. Signs, symbols and archetypes are pried from every incident and lofted chaotically into the mythological vacuum of the modern world. The presumption is that these fragments are awaiting a supersign that will unify them into some sort of new mythic order. When this in fact occurs in Tournier's book, the effect is one not of artistic revelation but of melodramatic kitsch: a young Auschwitz refugee turns into a Star of David; the star, in turn, spins off to the heavens...
Without at least a mail-order course in triadic dialectics, it is best to forgo analysis of Tournier's synthesis. Enough said that it has much to do with his notion that symbols have lives of their own and possess a diabolical potential. Yet in The Ogre, in contrast with his last book, Friday, Tournier seems incapable of expressing an idea without sacrificing art to pedagogy. As an old East Prussian aristocrat says just before the Russians do a Götterdammerung on his castle, "When the symbol devours the thing symbolized, when the cross-bearer becomes the crucified...