The Ogre - Softcover

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 *

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.