Misplaced Pages

The Erl-King (novel)

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
1970 novel by Michel Tournier
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "The Erl-King" novel – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
The Ogre
AuthorMichel Tournier
Original titleLe Roi des aulnes
TranslatorBarbara Bray
LanguageFrench
PublisherÉditions Gallimard
Publication date9 September 1970
Publication placeFrance
Published in English1972
Pages395
ISBN2-07-010627-6

The Erl-King (French: Le Roi des aulnes) is a 1970 novel by the French writer Michel Tournier. It is also known as The Ogre. The novel received the Prix Goncourt. The 1996 film The Ogre, directed by Volker Schlöndorff, is based on the novel.

Currently it is published in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Books.

Summary

The story is about Abel Tiffauges, who attends the Saint-Christophe boarding-school where he meets Nestor, a privileged student who will take him under his wing and adore him so much as to let him indulge his obsessions. Abel first writes about his childhood and his life in life before 1939 in his personal diary. After World War I, Abel finds himself being a dedicated pigeon keeper and a soldier in Alsace. Then, he is taken prisoner and deported throughout Germany and Poland in East Prussia (German region that corresponds to the current Kaliningrad Oblast/Königsberg in Western Russia).

He will later be imprisoned in the Moorhof camp (close to Insterburg – today Chernyakhovsk – and to Gumbinnen – today Gusev), and will then make it to the reservation of Rominten (in the South-Eastern part of East Prussia), in the hunting ground of Göring he calls "the ogre of Rominten". He then finds himself having to recruit children in the Mazurian region. He saves Ephraïm, a Jewish boy who came from a Lithuanian camp and escapes while carrying him on his back through swamps. The novel ends with the following sentence:

Quand Abel leva pour la dernière fois la tête vers Ephraïm, il ne vit qu'une étoile d'or à six branches qui tournait lentement vers le ciel noir.

See also

References

  1. "Le Palmarès". academie-goncourt.fr (in French). Académie Goncourt. Retrieved 2011-11-27.

External links

Works by Michel Tournier, adaptations, and books about Tournier
Novels
Short stories
Essays
Film adaptations
Related
Category


Stub icon

This article about a World War II novel first published in the 1970s is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page.

Categories: