“Mr. Tournier, a failed philosopher, came late to literature – his first novel, Friday, was published in 1967, when he was 43 – but got off to a running start. The Académie Française awarded its grand prize to that novel, his retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe … Ogre (published in England as The Erl-King), the twisting story of a French prisoner of war who ends up procuring boys for an elite Hitler youth camp, won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1970.”