The Ogre

Engrossing, poetic, and profoundly eventful.

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.

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.

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.

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