Le Vent Paraclet—which is about Michel Tournier's life, his books, his esthetic ideas, and his quarrels with French institutions, mankind, history, and the cosmos—is a book that raises problems. The most important is that of how seriously it is to be taken, given its many visible inconsistencies and the far-fetched quality of some of its assertions. Though these essays provide information about his novels, they cannot be said to be seamless interpretations of those texts. Tournier tries to place them within a certain esthetic field, to suggest in part what he intended them to do, and to authorize others to offer their interpretations of them. He does the last by asserting that creative works get away from their author's control in order to control him; such an inversion is accompanied by another through which Tournier incorporates aspects of other men's writing in order to put them to better, fuller use in his own. One gathers that if Tournier can manipulate the works of other authors as he says he has done and feel justified in having done so, then a critic, provided he has some weight of evidence, can manipulate Tournier in a like way.

Manipulation may be the wrong word, however, for what may be happening may be nothing more than an examination of ramifications or, in terms of a hoarier critical vocabulary, a search for comparisons and contrasts which, extending in order to compare, produce unexpected revelations. What they reveal may turn out to be a situated body of material (a novel by Tournier) which, because of its situation, allows and may even necessitate interpretative statements of an order quite different from that contained in the author's retrospective discourse. Tournier may know, because he remembers it, what he intended at the outset of one of his writings; he may be unable, precisely because he is remembering the intention, to assess the full range of what it has ultimately produced. If that is so, his books no longer belong to him; they have become his readers'.

Much of what is said in this book is meant to be openly provocative when it is not merely playful…. (pp. 918-19)

Though it is always interesting to read, Le Vent Paraclet is all too frequently banal. Tournier does not always address himself to matters a reader might have expected to find under discussion here. Some of his more ambitious speculations are, in the most generous assessment, examples of thoughts which have not yet thought themselves fully out. One senses this while reading his meteorological speculations, where he does not treat the most important questions because, one suspects, he does not see them….

I am trying to suggest that any reader of Tournier's novels will feel compelled to read and meditate about this book; that reader may find that he also has to try to put together from Le Vent Paraclet the book that Tournier intended but did not have the self-discipline or understanding to write. For what is lacking in this curious mélange is a convincing enabling base for its most flamboyant assertions. They reveal themselves as arbitrary, at times dangerously so because of their appeal; and they become questionable because, rather than being closely argued and structured in order to persuade, they are proclaimed as a series of clauses in a manifesto promising the redemption of Michel Tournier and his incorporation into the cosmos. Some readers may believe that a temperament which articulates its learning, leanings and longings in this manner uncomfortably recalls others in this century whose programs have led to entirely too much waste and devastation. (p. 919)