The Fetishist

by Michel Tournier

Book Overview

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385153546
• ISBN13: 9780385153546
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fabulist Tales

Tournier was a 'hot' writer in the 70s and 80s and all his work remains in print and in translation. My French isn't up to assessing the quality of this translation, but the prose seems sensuous and discreet, the work of a particularly precise and practical mind. 'The Fetishist' is a collection of short stories, each playfully perverting any whiff of inevitability. Tournier's deadly wit is evident in equal measure throughout, though,'Prickly','The Red Dwarf','The Woodcock','Death and the Maiden,and,'Lily of the Valley Lay-by' especially enchant. If you haven't read the weightier works, you have a treat in store. But these fabulous tales will set you in the Tournier meter. Surreal? Yes, for all their formal structure and classic allusions, their beguiling surfaces are determined to deceive. Not through the verbal or linguistic collisions of surrealistic poetry, but in the polished inversions of the 'rational' found in Magritte and Ernst. Tournier's dense but balletic footwork has kinship with Umberto Ecco's fiction. For all the sexual darkness that permeates Tournier's ouvre, there is also what he defines as,'white humour', a marriage of the cosmic with the comic. It's an apt definition of what I find contagious about his writing, extending even to his excellent autobiography,'The Wind Spirit'.

Visually exciting tales and dreams to be read at full moon.

In this very fine collection of stories Michel Tournier shows his extreme craftsmanshift not only with the french language, but also with the cultural and natural, physical and metaphysical, reality and dreams that fingerprint him as the creator of the most visually exciting prose. This book will enchant you, to be read at rate of a story a day, as Chaucers stories of our century.

This fetichist is a man

Michel Tournier has wrote many great books like The ogre, Friday and Gemini. But to fully understand the real genius of that man, we need to read them all. The Fetichist can be found in Le Coq de Bruyère or as a single small book. It is also called Act for a Lonely Man. It is the story of a guy escaped from a psychiatric institute who appears on a stage in a town we doesn't know. Instead of being welcomed with tomatoes or potatoes, he his welcomed with attentive ears. He talks about his life and his perceptions of life. Though we know he is some kind of crazy man, we cannot take his words and put them to trash. What he says about life is simply too real. Michel Tournier wnated us to believe the words of an insane man, and we believed. So we can say now, that even if we are alone and insane, we can have the greatest thoughts of all humanity. Pascal Tremblay