Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Translation of La rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Shut up in his room, he was filled with a great pity for himself and longed to recover the peace of mind, the calm of the senses, the happy life that had vanished along with the leaf he had abandoned that evening to the drifting current. He opened a novel, but at the first mention of love he pitched the volume down, and fell to reading a book of travel, following the steps of an English explorer into the reed palace of the King of Uganda. He ascended the Upper Nile to Urondogami; hippopotamuses snorted in the swamps, waders and guinea-fowl rose in flight, while a herd of antelopes sped flying through the tall grasses. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. Translation of: Le puits de Sainte ClaireDownload Description
On coming to himself, he smelt the perfume of myrtles and roses, and looking out of window saw a garden that descended in successive declivities to the sea. Signora Loreta, standing at his bed's head, took up her viol and began playing a tender air. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Satire in which penguins become human via evolution. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Penguin Island
If you like your satire served with brilliant wit with a touch of irony and a side of righteous anger, then Anatole France (the pen name of Jacques Anatole François Thibault) is your writer. You can credit Anatole France, winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the famous maxim: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Penguin Island starts with a fantastic premise. A missionary, half blind, comes across the island of penguins and baptizes them. Up in heaven, confounded with this act, the Lord gives the birds souls and intellect. France then uses his new civilization to satirize almost anything within range of his scathing intellect. The book generally parallels the development of human civilization. The longest chapter, the story of Pyrot and the 80,000 Trusses of Hay is a blistering critique of the French government's frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus. This chapter alone justifies the price of the book.

For those who have come to this review through my Tour de France history or my cycling commentary, it should be noted that the Dreyfus Affair was the proximate cause of the creation of Tour de France.

Anatole France is a genius. I heartily recommend this book.
-Bill McGann, Author of "The Story of the Tour de France"

Excellent if you enjoy satire
This book is almost one hundred years old and it is still very relevant as a source of universal unchanging truths.

I am reading it as an E-book in the original French. France has a lovely style in his native language which is at the same time poetic, erudite and easy to read. Reading classic satire makes you realize how we are fundamentally the same and will probably never change. I was struck by a section punctuating the conclusion of the Pyrot ( Dreyfuss ) affair in which he comments that it was back to business as usual:

"The government remained under the control of the major financial institutions, the army dedicated exclusively to the defense of capital, the navy served only as a source of orders for the steel industry and the rich refused to pay their fair share of taxes. The poor, as before, paid for them."

Sound like any place you know?

If satire is your thing this is good stuff. It helps to be familiar with French pomposity and European history.

Outrageous satire
A pious monk discovers a previously unknown island. He is half deaf and more than half blind with age. Even so, he can see that the diminutive people here are gentle, serious, and not yet Christian. He performs a mass baptism, not realizing that he has created Christian penguins.

So begins France's straight-faced satire of the church, the state, and anything else he can think of. First, the innocents must clothe their nakedness. This creates modesty for them, but also creates immodesty, lust-inducing arts of skirt and bodice, and avarice for finer clothes and baubles. Next, they develop property law, proven by disputes over farmland. They create a noble class, when one demonstrates his nobility by killing another penguin and taking his land. They create a royalty, by means of fraud and extortion. They even create their first saint, the miraculous virgin Ste. Orberosia. She seemed best known for her miraculous virginity, which she proclaimed until her dying day (and we don't argue with saints). In fact, she was able to proclaim her virginity even after dozens or hundreds of encounters that would have destroyed it in less holy a woman - miraculous indeed. Perhaps the penguins weren't born subject to Original Sin, but they're mighty quick with the imitation.

The History of Penguinia moves forward, through ages of avarice, adultery, elaboarate scams, false accusations, and all the usual goings-on of the political world. The events are painfully funny, right down to the cynical, cyclical view of modern times, locked into an historical rhythm. The views are painful only because they're so very true.

I imagine they would have been even more true for me if I knew more about the political current events of France and Europe circa 1900, when this book was being written. I also suspect some wordplay in characters' names that would have been amusing if I knew French. It is a measure of Anatole France's genuius that now, nearly a hundred years later, it's still true enough for a modern reader, and one unfamiliar with the book's original milieu. I imagine this book will reward the prepared reader even more richly.

This is satire at its finest - funny, but with an edge, and funny because it's so very true.

//wiredweird

An exceedingly unusual but very entertaining novel
This novel simply isn't like anything else ever written.

A monk visiting an island populated by nothing but penguins accidentally baptizes them, and the saints in heaven debate what is to be done, since baptism can only be done to those with souls.The conclusion is to make the penguins human!The remainder of the book is a history of Penguin Island, which is a clever parody of European history.It may not be everyone's piece of pie, but I defy anyone to say that they have seen its like before.

the humans are penguins!
those blasted penguins were baptised and changed into penguins! this satire depicts the history of France!enjoy! :) ... Read more