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If not by nature, then by habit, people tend to match one thing with another—man and woman, laughter and tears, sickness and health, fire and water, master and servant—thereby accentuating similarities and contrasts and opening a field of relations. In The Mirror of Ideas, Michel Tournier examines these pairs and a …

Friday, winner of the 1967 Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française, is a sly, enchanting retelling of the legend of Robinson Crusoe by the man the New Yorker calls "France's best and probably best-known writer." Cast away on a tropical island, Michel Tournier's god-fearing Crusoe sets out to tame it, to remake …