The Ogre

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 1972 Tournier's achievement rests in his remarkable blend of myth with realism. Newsweek