Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique Reading Order

Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday, or, The Other Island, 1967) by Michel Tournier is the Prix du roman de l'Académie française winner that established him as one of the most important French novelists of his generation — a reworking of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe that inverts the colonial and philosophical values of the original. Robinson Crusoe is stranded on his island after a shipwreck, but where Defoe's Robinson uses the island as an occasion to recreate European civilisation (planting crops, building fences, domesticating animals, converting Friday to Christianity), Tournier's Robinson is gradually converted by the island itself: he begins to lose his European rationalising consciousness and to enter into a different relationship with the natural world, with time, and finally with the solar world that the island's vegetation inhabits. When Friday arrives, the relationship is inverted from Defoe's: Friday becomes Robinson's teacher rather than his servant, showing Robinson how to live in a mode that is not the European mode of mastery and exploitation. The novel is one of the great philosophical novels of the twentieth century — a critique of Eurocentrism, of the Protestant work ethic, of the Enlightenment project of rational mastery over nature — written as a story of adventure and survival that is accessible to children and profound for adults. Tournier wrote a simplified version for younger readers (Vendredi ou la vie sauvage) that is one of the most widely read French books in French schools.