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Penguin Island

Anatole France

Novels & StoriesEnglish
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A short-sighted old saint, Maël, drifting at sea in a stone trough, lands on an island of great auks and, mistaking them for people, baptises them. The…

Catalogue details

Author
Anatole France
Category
Novels & Stories
Language
English
Source
Project Gutenberg

About this book

A short-sighted old saint, Maël, drifting at sea in a stone trough, lands on an island of great auks and, mistaking them for people, baptises them. The baptism causes such confusion in heaven that God turns the birds into human beings, and Anatole France then tells the whole history of the Penguins, a parody of the history of France: its legends and saints, kings and revolutions, wars, a scandal that is a thinly disguised Dreyfus Affair, and finally a modern world of financiers and anarchists.

Context and significance

Published in 1908, the satire is one of France's most celebrated books, and its mockery of nationalism, the Church and the army has lost little of its bite. Then turn to his Thaïs, and compare Gulliver's Travels.

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