The Ogre

by Michel Tournier

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394724070
• ISBN13: 9780394724072
• Release Date: March 1984
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 373 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

My only review -

This book haunts me. I keep going back to it. Ive never reviewed a book but I felt the need here. Ive real endless books but this one is different. read it.

Peculiar and original

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.

Absolute, Unforgetable masterpiece

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!

Absolutely disturbing, absolutely magnificent

Erl king is the story of Abel, an ogre by definition, a man who likes young boys, flesh and blood. In a book cast with dreams of allegories, eating becomes devouring and shadows turn into evil spirits tyring to steal young souls away. Narrated by a crippled mind, "Erl king" takes place in WW2 France and Germany, where the frenzy of a lost soul is agonized by the fury of a generation, sacrificing their sons for a lost ideal, taking away Ogre's only meal...