SOURCE: "Michel Tournier's Texts for Children," in Children's Literature, Vol. 13, 1985, pp. 154-68.

In the following essay, McMahon examines the themes of Tournier's novels for children and discusses their differences from his adult works.

I think that a child's readings constitute for him an intangible mine, an unattackable base on which are built, more than his literary culture and judgments, his personal sensitivity and mythology.

                                  —Le Vent Paraclet

The texts Michel Tournier—who is thought by some to be France's outstanding living novelist—has written for children are for the most part strikingly different from those he has written for adults. In the latter, he has purposefully played with his readers in an effort to force them to ask themselves questions about the attitudes they bring to reading. He has found other ways of being provocative by enunciating in Le Vent Paraclet, where he writes mainly about his own...