Gemini Book

Gemini is an oneiric chorus of multiple voices loosely charting the lugubrious tale of two incestuous twin brothers, but interspersed with parallel synchronised storylines which fuse the peristaltic threads of the narrative into a single storyboard ingot.

In a way, the eponymous Gemini are red herrings: the underlying theme is cryptophasial ontology, but expanded from its filial scope as a possible rubric for other sapient relationships. I would like to say here 'all' sapient relationships, but Tournier is beguiling on this point: unapologetically misogynistic, he focuses predominantly on male interactions and the exclusivity of a linkage (emotional and physical) totally unencumbered and uninformed by biological imperative. In this he has a point: its probably true to say that all societal norms are usually predicated on procreational considerations, to which the homosexual community need not subscribe. Still, perhaps there is no need for this exclusivity to ostracise all things Cytherean.

That notwithstanding, Gemini offers a finessed reversal of perspective, through the voice of Alexandre (the gay uncle of the twins), where homosexuality becomes the anchoring societal norm and the heterosexual world is relegated to marginalised status: cleverly rendered binocular vision.
Some of the props here become character actors in their own right: there is a recurring monton of garbage throughout: garbage as a collection of human 'signatures' and 'celebrations' but most of all, as a metaphor, or signifier even, of the base layer which imbues humanity: all of our psychologically teratological history streamed through the debris of our cast-off. And strangely, there is also a tapeworm. This tapeworm seems to sneak out of various anuses at the most inopportune moments: or perhaps, quite opportunely, at moments when characters most seek to affirm their social worth, the tapeworm is discharged as a slimy birth down their legs. Perhaps a timely reminder we are all poos in a pod. Or something.

An understated humour has incremental creep here: constellations of events are arranged just-so in the build up to spectacularly comic mis-en-scenes, quickly doused thereafter with rather too grim reality. In a brilliant scene (pg 258) the twins father assumes he will be arrested for running illicit underground propaganda during WWII (which we know is an over-exaggeration since he is singularly lazy and too addicted to the fine life to put his neck on the line). A two page soliloquy ensues where dad takes his leave of his family as he prepares to be martyred, his name forever remembered in the anals of history, when the gendarmes arrest his unassuming, matronly, meek wife, for serious subterfuge. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Of course, the sting in the tail is that mum is never seen again.

Gemini is foremost a rambling rumination on the intricacies of human relations ,and the many layers they traverse. Elaborate, mellifluous, shocking at times, and always captivating.