The Ogre [Paperback]

Michel Tournier (Author), Barbara Bray (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 1997

An international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Engrossing, poetic, and profoundly eventful.

(Washington Post Book World )

The Ogre... is, quite simply, a great novel... [It] bears patently the marks of greatness. It relentlessly pushes individual idiosyncrasy to—and even beyond—the point of universality. It covers simultaneously the events inside one head and one continent. It uses documentary knowledge—minute and encyclopedic knowledge of photography, history, zoology, anthropometry, weaponry—to illustrate the otherwise undocumentable progress of a human obsession.

(New Yorker )

Barbara Bray's translation does justice to the original... Abel Tiffauges is as complex and dangerous in English as he is in French; his themes are eternal and disturbing. To follow his dark path is a magnificent experience.

(New York Times Book Review )

The Ogre is a very clever book in its belletristic way, and the translation reads very well... Tiffauges's obsessions—a cornucopia of the ocular, the cloacal, of celibacy, heraldry, therapies, wounds, beats, boys, and twins—are conveyed in an alliterative rhetoric of rare words and allusions.

(New York Review of Books )

Tournier's achievement rests in his remarkable blend of myth with realism.

(Newsweek )

Book Description

A highly praised novel from the author of Gemini—now in a new paperback edition

(1972)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080185590X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801855900
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > European

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An ambiguous treatment of an unambiguous subject, March 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ogre (Paperback)

Although considered part of the Western Canon (by Harold Bloom), you won't find this one on any of the lists of the Best Novels of the 20th Century. It's a shame that a work of this quality and power has not reached a wider audience, or has been so readily forgotten, especially since it deals with one of the most significant events of the 20th century: the Holocaust.

The Ogre is the story of of a French mechanic whose bizarre habits (eating raw meat, photographing and tape-recording children) would send most people running from his company, but Abel Tuffauges is an innocent who is slowly sucked into the German war machine. His adventures take him deeper into Germany, into the imaginative wilderness of his youth, and deeper into the past, illustrating the contrast between the French and the German cultures. The story is framed with wonderful mythoological images, from the story of St. Cristopher to a blind moose that visits Abel in 'Canada' -- a secluded cabin in the German hinterland.

The novel achieves its full power when Abel is drawn into recruting for the Hitler youth, though he does not realize what fate he has doomed his beloved boys to until he finds a Jewish child who has escaped from Auchwitz. Abel realizes that he has been living a life of ghastly inversions and that the only way to redeem himself is to rescue this child.

The Ogre is a stunning meditation on the nature of evil, and innocence, and the character of Abel Tuffagues has all the strange originality of literature's most memorable personages. Unlike Schindler's List, The Ogre deals ambiguously with the unambiguous evil of the Holocaust, and thus, offers a far more interesting, troubling and rewarding perspetive on the subject. Highly recommended.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolute, Unforgetable masterpiece, August 19, 2001

By 

T. BRANNEY (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ogre (Paperback)

Michel Tournier is, without doubt, the most important French writer of the last 50 years. One of his biographers has spoken of him having "Reconceived the very nature of fiction". 'The Ogre' (his second book) is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of that same period and yet it seems to have fallen, if not into obscurity, then at least somewhat out of the spotlight.

Tournier is most interested in the essential myths of Western culture. He reinterprets these in his novels and uses them to critique the assumptions and the norms of our society.

'The Ogre' or 'The Erl-King' as it was originally titled, is an utterly extraordinary book. It concerns the life of Abel Tiffauges, a physical monster, but also an innocent. His story is set largely among the rise and fall of the third Reich, but encompasses a breathtaking array of mythological, psychological and spiritual ideas.

The language of the novel is sumptuous, the attention to detail unparallelled. Certain passages of the book are completely heart-breaking, particularly when exposing the casual cruelty of man, whilst others are entrancingly beautiful.

Alongside that the book is also a compulsively readable tale of adventure, destiny and discovery. Full of wonderfully arcane details and fabulously structured parallels and mirrors the book continually delights and enriches the reader.

I've just finished re-reading 'The Ogre', some 12 or so years after my first encounter, and I can honestly say it's still the best book I've ever read.

All lovers of Nabokov, Calvino, Borges, Joyce & John Banville, to name a few, should order their copy now!

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Peculiar and original, February 1, 2002

By 

Mikael Kuoppala (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Ogre. (Hardcover)

When Michel Tournier is mentioned to someone, you often hear comments like: "Isn't that the author who could only write about human sexual perversions?", but if you examine his work more deeply, you'll see that there is a lot more to his writing than that.

"The Ogre" is his second novel and it starts by telling us the story of a French mechanic named Abel Tiffauges, living during the end of 1930's, who one day injures his right hand.

This fascinating novel is divided into six segments, from wich the first (and the longest) is the most fascinating, as it deals with this multi-dimencional character's past and present by the way of one year's worth of diaries wich he starts writing with his left hand after the previously mentioned accident. By the end of the segment this strange character of Abel Tiffauges with his peculiar habits and personality feels extremely real and deep, hence securing the feeling of reality of the whole artistically written book. Finally, the segment ends as Tiffauges stops writing after the beginning of the war between France and Germany.

The first segment is followed by three weaker segments wich, unlike the first one, are told in a traditional third-person narrating and are filled with surprisingly unlikely coincidences and forced events as they describe Tiffauges' journey through nazi-Germany, first as a French soldier, then as a prisoner of war, and finally a ranger.

Then the novel improves again as it gets to its fift segment, wich almost raises to the level of the first one. It shows us an itriquing transformation process, as, again by ridiculously not beliavable coincidences, Tiffauges ends up being an SS-officer and an instructor in a Hitler-Jugend training facility.

Step by step this first reluctant character grows more and more fascinated with anti-semitism and the complex scientific assumptions about racial differences. The segment is dark and unsettling, as the character is devided into two, when he can't separate reality with what he's been thought.

In the sixth and final segment the reader gets to witness Tiffauges' journey through chaos, as he experiences an enlightment that leads to his understanding of his own inner evil and eventually to self-destruction. This process is unevenly described, and not sufficiently explained, as it occurs suddenly and doesn't really lead anywhere.

The ending of the book is blurry, and it leaves the reader frustrated, as it leaves issues unfinished and not dealt with.

In the end "The Ogre" is a book that I recommend to anyone, even though many people will probably not like it as much as I did.

But weather you like it or not, don't leave it unfinished. Once you start it, you'll have to see it through.