Recommendations
Books Like L'Île des pingouins
Best books to read after L'Île des pingouins by Anatole France
If the allegorical satire and cyclical pessimism of Penguin Island stayed with you, these eight novels share its tools: mock-epic history, the ironic distance between human pretension and human reality, and the systematic analysis of political and religious institutions through laughter.
- 1Buy
Les Dieux ont soif
by Anatole France
France's own most direct companion to Penguin Island — the revolutionary period that Penguin Island satirizes historically is here dramatized in close psychological focus as the story of a Jacobin juror consumed by revolutionary virtue.
- 2Buy
La Révolte des anges
by Anatole France
France's theological sequel to the political argument of Penguin Island: the angels who rebel against God discover that the victor will become the new God, the same circular pessimism applied now to metaphysics.
- 3Buy
Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
The founding text of the tradition Penguin Island belongs to: the satirical invented civilization that is transparently a commentary on the real one, here applied to every human institution — politics, science, warfare, philosophy.
- 4Buy
Candide
by Voltaire
Voltaire's ironic philosophical tale is the most direct French predecessor of France's satirical method: a rapid-fire tour of human institutions seen through the eyes of a naive observer who keeps discovering the same disasters wherever he goes.
- 5Buy
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov's Soviet-era theological satire uses the same tools as France: a visiting supernatural figure (here the Devil rather than God) whose presence exposes the absurdity and corruption of the surrounding society.
- 6Buy
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Orwell's allegory of the Russian Revolution uses the same device as Penguin Island — an invented animal society that is transparently a commentary on human political history — and reaches the same circular pessimism: the revolution produces the thing it overthrew.
- 7Buy
Bouvard et Pécuchet
by Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert's satirical encyclopedia of human stupidity is the most sustained French satirical project of France's century and the one France's ironic method most directly continues: a systematic demonstration that every human intellectual enterprise collapses into the same mediocrity.
- 8Buy
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
Gibbon's great historical work, whose ironic treatment of Christianity and the role of human folly in historical decline is the non-fiction version of the argument that France's mock-epic historical satire makes through fiction.
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