Volume 31, Number 17 · November 8, 1984
Polymorphic Peter Pan
By John Weightman
The Fetishist
by Michel Tournier, translated by Barbara Wright
Doubleday, 212 pp., $13.95
Like all his other works, this first collection of short stories by one of the most interesting French novelists of recent years has suffered a change of name in passing from one language to another, and the fact is probably worth commenting on, since it highlights the specific nature of his writing. The original volume is called Le Coq de bruyère, after the title of one of the longer pieces, here translated as 'The Woodcock,' a term that was no doubt felt to be too blank and unispiring as a general heading for the English-speaking public. Actually, the rendering 'woodcock' is incorrect, at least as bird names go in Great Britain. If my childhood memories of country life are still reliable, a woodcock is a shy creature with a soft, mothlike flight (la bécasse des bois in French), whereas le coq de bruyère is a capercailzie or grouse, a species noted for the flamboyant mating behavior of the male birds. The story centers, in fact, around a provincial French aristocrat who is all sprucely and bouncingly sexy—notre petit coq de bruyère, as his mother calls him. 'Our little bantam cock' might have come somewhere near the meaning, if the bantam had not been a farmyard fowl.
Review, 2616 words
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