December 19, 1924

Michel Tournier (December 19, 1924 to January 18, 2016) was a French writer. After his death, Shelf Awareness published these words:

'French novelist Michel Tournier, "who blended myth and philosophy in prizewinning novels that revisited Robinson Crusoe, Goethe's elf king and the biblical tale of the Three Magi," died January 18, the New York Times reported. He was 91. The Académie Française awarded its grand prize to Tournier's first novel,Friday, which was published in 1967. The Ogre won the Prix Goncourt in 1970. The Times noted that Tournier "went on to write several more novels, along with literary and art criticism, that explored large themes in a style he called 'hyperrealist,' an approach that made him a closer cousin to writers like Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie than to the leading French writers of his day.'

A picture of Michel Tournier--





Most of his books mention cats. A random example, from The Four Wise Men (1982):

"Since leaving the Malabar Coast— where a cat is a cat and two and two is four— I seem to have ventured into a garden of onions, for here every thing, every animal, every person has an apparent meaning, which conceals a second sense which, when deciphered, points the way to a third, and so forth and so on. And something very similar seems to have happened to me...."