Les Météores Reading Order

Les Météores (Gemini, 1975) by Michel Tournier is his longest and most structurally elaborate novel — a meditation on twins, meteorology, identity, and the nature of the self that unfolds across the full geography of the contemporary world. The twins Jean and Paul are monozygotic — mirror images, sharing what Tournier calls a 'cell' of total identity that excludes the rest of the world. When Jean leaves the shared existence to pursue his own individual life across the globe (Djerba, Japan, Vancouver, Berlin), Paul embarks on a journey to recover him — a journey that becomes increasingly a meditation on what identity means when it has been half-removed. The novel is also, as its title suggests, a meditation on meteorology: weather systems as a figure for the collective life of human beings, whose desires and movements are as unpredictable and as systematic as the weather. Tournier weaves into the narrative extensive digressions on the metaphysics of twinhood, on garbage (one of the twins works in waste disposal, and Tournier uses this to develop a philosophy of refuse and recycling), on the Japanese aesthetic, and on the geography and culture of the various places Jean visits. Les Météores is the most Proustian of Tournier's novels — long, digressive, encyclopaedic — and also the most playful.