Customer Reviews

Gemini

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The richness and profoundity of this novel is not often encountered: every page teems with ideas and insights on the human conditions.It narrates the story of a french family between the thirties and the building of the Berln Wall, and expecially the lives of the twins Jean and Paul, initially forming a very close communion of souls. But one of the twins breaks out and goes to live with a mistress, eventually traveling around the world follwed by his estranged counterprt. Their history is the occasion for exploring all instances of pairing, of complementarity and contrapositions, of the fundamental duality and ambiguity of reality and the human soul. The characters are depicted with profound and original insight of their emotions and the meaning of love and religion. If you haven't read this book, do it! You'll feel enriched and nurtured while sumptuously entertained.

This is a love story with a difference. Jean and Paul are identical twins, so alike that people have given up distinguishing them and simply call them Jean-Paul. They have a relationship that is "incestuous beyond all others" (meaning it exists at 4 levels: between siblings, between same-sex siblings, between same-sex twin siblings, between same-sex twin identical siblings); each night they make love not in the crude, vulgar, maladroit manner of the heterosexual, but in a sort of seminal communion, a transcendent exchange that expresses the oneness of the universe. But as they grow up Jean begins to feel the suffocation of Paul's ovoid embrace. He runs away from Paul, and Paul embarks on a search in places that reflect their twinship and separation --Venice, Japan, Vancouver and divided Berlin. To Paul, the identical twin is the most perfect of all beings; he feels sorry for the abject solitude of singletons and non-twins, and scoffs at their efforts to attain, through heterosexual sex, a form of imperfect, ersatz twinship. The irony is that his twinship itself is imperfect, because Jean wants none of it. Paul's search for Jean is a metaphysical search for wholeness that is touching and pathetic. Michel Tournier's novel is extraordinary in its rich, dizzying explorations of dualities, complementarities, oppositions, reflections, separations, conjoinings and dispairments. The language --beautifully translated here-- is dense and lush with images, colours, smells, ideas that startle the reader with their sheer beauty and novelty.With stupendous originality, Tournier has given love a whole new dimension.

Exiting a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan I spied the title and cover photo on this book. It was on a table of "books on sale", selling for about $4.00. As a new father and a Gemini (astrologically) I was intrigued by the book's cover and when I read the comments from Jean Genet and Salmon Rushdie on the back, as well as a description of the book...I was definately hooked.

WOW...am I glad I bought that book.

I am really into this book and I can't explain why exactly. It haunts me. It keeps drawing me back to it. It's full of ideas, great writing and I love what I learned about Ruah, Zen Gardens and the intimate connections of twins and non-twins alike.

This book is definately for folks who like to think about the interdependence of things, of people and places...and about the intimate relationships of semmingly disconnected phenomenae. Oh man.

I love this book. Find out for yourself...if you can find it!!!

Michel Tournier writes here with a marvelous combination of dissociated beauty and unnerving focus on the body. Not a body that serves as a vehicle for the mind, but a body that complicates the actions of the mind, a body that sweats and defecates and indulges in a variety of sexual acts.
There is Jean, who runs from the oppressive physical love of his twin Paul, and the bodily need he sees reflected in Paul's identical copy on his own physique.
There is the twins' uncle, who reminds himself daily that he made his fortune in the sanitation business by enclosing samples of sewage from each of his plants in a series of pendants, which he wears around his neck.
And yet for all his intentional vulgarity and viscerality, Tournier never writes a sentence that is any less than lyrical (and Anne Carter's translation from the French does him perfect justice).
A traveling student doesn't have the room in his or her suitcases for too many books, but "Gemini" has found a permanent place in mine.