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...