Michel Tournier's Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar [classified as a novel] … emerges rather as a series of short stories, linked, albeit tenuously, by their several relations to the iconography and legends of the Christian Nativity. The various adventures of Gaspard, Melchior, and Balthazar are recounted separately, leading up to the meeting of the three kings just prior to their encounter with Herod. Tournier handles the transitions with such technical perfection that the lack of any essential connection between the stories poses no problem and, in fact, passes virtually unnoticed. Each of the kings functions more as a medium for the author's ideas, or as an excuse for his (sometimes too-great) cleverness, than as a genuine multidimensional character….

The book's final, and longest, story is that of Taor, prince of Mangalore, who sets out ostensibly to find the recipe for pistachio Turkish delight … and ultimately becomes, at the end of his life, the first person to experience the Eucharist. Within the story of Taor's physical and spiritual journey, Tournier inserts another charming fable, that of the deification of Taor's favorite elephant, Yasmina, who becomes a goddess in the country of the baobab worshipers. A less felicitous digression is the gratuitous and spiteful detailing, full of double-entendres, of the social life of the Sodomites. Nevertheless, Taor's story is the most original and most satisfying section of the work. (p. 311)

Tournier has a natural talent for spinning tales. There is something here of The Thousand and One Nights, replete with life-and-death dramas, passionate and unrequited loves, devotion and sacrifice, vast struggles for power as perceived by the participants, all laced with heavy doses of local color (with a special penchant for details chosen to set the squeamish squirming) and of fantasy (Tournier has written several works for children, and here he is often evidently writing for the child in every adult)…. There are occasional deliberate distortions of reality, recognizable as such, answering the author's purposes of ironic commentary or whimsical fancy. The work partakes liberally of the long French tradition of irreverence toward the surface aspects of religion, and yet there is nothing but respect for the Incarnation as the central core of Christian teaching.

In short, the novel is clearly intended to please, as Tournier's many nudges of connivance to the reader make obvious, and on the level it has set for itself, it works very well indeed as an enjoyable diversion. (pp. 311-12)