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Friday

Friday

by Michel Tournier, translated from the French by Norman Denny

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book Fiction French Literature
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The January 2026 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Friday is the Friday of Robinson Crusoe, and Michel Tournier's retelling of Defoe's tale of solitude and survival turns it on its head. Cast away on a tropical island, the God-fearing Crusoe hasn't the least doubt what he must do: tame the wilderness and stamp it with the sign of civilization, a fool's errand to which he devotes years and in which he comes close to succeeding. Then Friday shows up, infuriating him with his "irrepressible, lyrical, and blasphemous" laugh, and a new, more challenging task confronts the island's self-proclaimed master. But after an unforeseen event destroys all of Crusoe's work, it is up to Friday to teach him just how ignorant he is and always has been.

Friday was Tournier's first novel, and it quickly found a wondering and delighted readership. Writing about the book in his autobiography, Tournier asks, "What was Friday to Daniel Defoe? Nothing: an animal, at best a creature waiting to receive his humanity from Robinson Crusoe, who as a European was in sole possession of all knowledge and wisdom." In Friday, Tournier steps out of the secular world of the Western novel into the sacred precincts of universal mythology. The result is radiant, sensual, funny, and utterly unexpected—a modern masterpiece.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379814
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

Tournier transposes Defoe's story into a vehicle for both symbolic action and philosophic reflection. The double point of view permits striking meditations not only on God, religion, and morality as in Defoe, but also on perception, identity, and the temptations of oblivion.
—Roger Shattuck, The New York Review of Books

A fascinating, unusual novel . . . a remarkably heady French wine in the old English bottle . . . Tournier has attempted nothing less than an exploration of the soul of modern man.
—The New York Times Book Review

Like [Crusoe’s island], Tournier’s novel is unique, self-sufficient, imaginative, well worth exploring, and with a number of minor miracles to reveal.
—Time

Friday is the latest and one of the best examples of the French genius for revisionism—for ringing original variations on a traditional theme. It is also unique in that enterprise because it is so moving, so touching in its elegance, so simple in its art.
—Richard Howard

Defoe’s book is distinguished by an unawareness of the psychology of solitude; nothing happens. Michel Tournier, however has placed his man in precisely the same situation of static impotence, and then proceeds to illustrate a personal development as passionate and variegated as anyone could wish.
—New Statesman

M. Tournier is a cultivated and disciplined writer, and his Robinson, the son of a Yorkshire draper, is most likable . . . The castaway has that quaint and peculiarly English stolidity that seems to exist only in the imagination of the French.
—The New Yorker

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