The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gemini by Michel Tournier
James Sallis

Untitled document

Michel Tournier. Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. 452 pp. Paper: $15.95.

One important question we ask concerning an artist is this: to what degree does his description or interpretation of the world intend to transform it? Repeatedly Tournier has taken up the hat of some conventional story of our culture, Robinson Crusoe, Jeanne d’Arc, and resewn it into gloves.

Gemini (Les Météores, 1975) is Tournier’s third novel and, in its integration of conflicting impulses and its lisibility, perhaps his most successful. Friday emerged in 1967 to win the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française; The Ogre took the Prix Goncourt three years later. Only with The Four Wise Men (1980) did Tournier gain attention here in the States. At home, for all his award winning, he remains a bowl-sized lump in the literary oatmeal, an earnest didact at odds with both the modernist tradition and the gospel of human progress.

That there is in Tournier a compulsiveness of intellect often in conflict with his brief as a novelist, only a fool would contest. In The Mirror of Ideas, he sketched the world as a rain of dualities. Gemini, with its tale of twins so indistinguishable that even their parents refer to them collectively as Jean-Paul, hangs from the same branch. The twins are a world to themselves, speaking their own language, minds and bodies intimately bound. But as they mature, Jean rebels, sailing off into that shadowy, besieged outer world. Paul, deeply rent, follows. Where once was unity, now everything bespeaks the twin’s separateness: Venice’s mirrored halls, Japanese Zen gardens, the Berlin wall.

In all Tournier’s work, it is as though on one hand he longs to diagram the world, to reduce it to schemata, and on the other, taking up again these old stories, somehow to remythologize them, to make them large again. From the pitched battle between these two urges, when he is at his best, Tournier generates tremendous energy. And in Gemini he is, make no mistake of it, at his best. [James Sallis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Gemini by Michel Tournier James Sallis Untitled document Michel Tournier. Gemini. Trans. Anne Carter. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. 452 pp. Paper: $15.95. One important question we ask concerning an artist is this: to what degree does his description or interpretation of the world intend to transform it? Repeatedly Tournier has taken up the hat of some conventional story of our culture, Robinson Crusoe, Jeanne d’Arc, and resewn it into gloves. Gemini (Les Météores, 1975) is Tournier’s third novel and, in its integration of conflicting impulses and its lisibility, perhaps his most successful. Friday emerged in 1967 to win the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française; The Ogre took the Prix Goncourt three years later. Only with The Four Wise Men (1980) did Tournier gain attention here in the States. At home, for all his award winning, he remains a bowl-sized lump in the literary oatmeal, an earnest didact at odds with both the modernist tradition and the gospel of human progress. That there is in Tournier a compulsiveness of intellect often in conflict with his brief as a novelist, only a fool would contest. In The Mirror of Ideas, he sketched the world as a rain of dualities. Gemini, with its tale of twins so indistinguishable that even their parents refer to them collectively as Jean-Paul, hangs from the same branch. The twins are a world to themselves, speaking their own language, minds and bodies intimately bound. But as they mature, Jean rebels, sailing off into that shadowy, besieged outer world. Paul, deeply rent, follows. Where once was unity, now everything bespeaks the twin’s separateness: Venice’s mirrored halls, Japanese Zen gardens, the Berlin wall. In all Tournier’s work, it is as though on one hand he longs to diagram the world, to reduce it to schemata, and on the other, taking up again these old stories, somehow to remythologize them, to make them large again. From the pitched battle between these two urges, when he is at his best, Tournier generates tremendous energy. And in Gemini he is, make no mistake of it, at his best. [James Sallis]

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