Le Vol du vampire
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Madame Maurice Genevoix, en hommage amical, Michel Tournier.”
Le Vol du vampire is a collection of reading notes. Publishing a book, Michel Tournier tells us, is releasing a flock of vampires, dry birds craving human warmth, which fly off in search of a reader on whom to alight so as to swell themselves with that reader’s life and dreams. Some fifty books thus alighted on the reader Tournier, who offers his critical notes on them, from Charles Perrault to Kant, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities to the work of Émile Zola, by way of Émile Ajar’s Gros-Câlin.
In 1967 Tournier had been awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, presented by the Académie’s Permanent Secretary at the time, Maurice Genevoix. Tournier subsequently made a habit of sending him inscribed copies of his books, a practice he continued after the writer’s death by sending his newly published books to his widow, Suzanne Genevoix.