Word: tournier
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FRIDAY by Michel Tournier (translated by Norman Denny). 235 pages. Doubleday...
This is what French Novelist Michel Tournier has done. The beautifully translated result, though, is far more than a Cartesian blueprint fleshed into creaky fiction. Like Crusoe I, but more elaborately in Tournier's version, Crusoe II shakes off despondency by creating a makeshift England, complete with fertile fields, full storehouses, a church, a fortress and an elaborate code of law and punishment with which to govern himself...
Eventually, Defoe's cannibals appear in Tournier's book, too, intending to eat a captive. Crusoe II frightens them off with gunpowder and English pluck, names the captive Friday, and sets about turning him into a proper British slave. He succeeds to the extent that Friday learns English and performs complicated chores. But the Negro-Indian half-caste will go no further; he refuses to be a black Englishman. Although he is tireless, he is not diligent. He is clever, but not rational. For him, the Church of England, punitive ditch digging and goatskin trousers are merely...
Young French Airman Jean-Louis Tournier, like a character out of Dumas, lived only for revenge-revenge for an indignity practiced upon him in a New York bar two years ago when a group of G.I.s got friendly with him, went along with him to his hotel room, and disappeared with all his possessions. Jean-Louis Tournier, having returned from his U.S. Air Force training, conceived a neat way to get even...
Last week, with the River Seine richer by more than 15 G.I. suitcases, the police finally caught up with Jean-Louis Tournier. "I never took anything for myself," he explained proudly to his captors. "It was a simple case of revenge...