Penguin Island
ByPublisher Description
Penguin Island, published by Anatole France in 1908, is a comic novel that satirizes the history of France, from its prehistory to the author’s vision of a distant future.
After setting out on a storm-tossed voyage of evangelization, the myopic St. Maël finds himself on an island populated by penguins. Mistaking them to be humans, Maël baptizes them—touching off a dispute in Heaven and ushering the Penguin nation into history.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesPenguin Island Reviews
“This book started absolutely stunningly, with the construction of a society's entire mythos, introduction of its most significant historical figures, and a rather funny analysis of how traditions come to be. It's great! But it loses a lot of steam as it goes on.
Which isn't to say that it ever becomes bad - the focus just shifts from fictional myth to fictional politics, and for some reason France fails to generate quite as much intrigue, perhaps because he can't seem to decide whether he wants to write about the politics or the (love)lives of the people (read: penguins) behind them.
There are a lot of lovely ideas, and the sheer scale of the novel - the documentation of an entire history spanning from the early middle-ages to the present is ambitious, and successful, I'd argue. But all the best bits are done by halfway.”
About Anatole France
Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault, 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924) was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
Other books by Anatole France
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