The Fetishist and Other Stories

Viac o knihe

In ''The Fetishist,'' a collection of 14 widely different short texts, Mr. Tournier demonstrates what a literary artist can do in the concentrated form of the story, tale or novella. Whether he stylizes a concrete situation or derives plots from an abstract idea (he shuttles back and forth between the two formulas), Mr. Tournier produces dramatic narratives whose impact is directly related to the economy of means. The ''knot of hatred'' that leads a dwarf to kill the beautiful woman whose lover he has become, the obsession with women's underwear that leads the fetishist to acts of violence, the lethal artistic experiments of the photographer - these are some of the situations Mr. Tournier exploits to illustrate how the literary craft can at the same time project and tame an omnipresent irrationality.