Michel Tournier, Le Coq De Bruyère

Each story is analyzed in detail for its meaning, residual ambiguities, artistic qualities and flaws, and its place in the total collection. As Tournier thinks big, even in a short text, Redfern finds many links between the longer fiction of Tournier's novels and these stories. Indeed, Tournier considers himself primarily as a teller of tales - or a re-teller - since several of these stories recycle, divert, and update such well-known narratives as Genesis, Cain and Abel, Tom Thumb, ogres, dwarfs, Robinson Crusoe, Tristan and Isolde, and St. Veronica. Tournier's obsessive themes of the androgyne, self-assertion, the multiple forms of creativity, and the overlapping of fixed categories give the collection its pointed and powerful resonance.