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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
This book is so beautifully balanced between character, plot, and setting. Each one of these elements added to the story in such a memorable way.
Characters
I did not have any neutral feelings about any of the characters, I either loved them and wanted so badly for them to escape the fates I knew were coming (Esmeralda and Quasimodo), or I wanted them to die in a fire (Frollo and Pheobus). The only exceptions to this were perhaps Gringoire and Jehan, who I thought were just mildly annoying but since they were important connective tissue between the goings-on in the church and the Cour des Miracles, I never really minded when they were "on screen."
There were, obviously, racist connotations to many of the characters, and Hugo's consistent use of the g*psy slur and obvious ignorance about actual Traveler culture was problematic to say the least (not to mention his obvious disdain for anyone who was not French and Catholic in the first Cour des Miracles scene). At times this was pretty pronounced, and it became hard for me, in the 21st century, to ignore it- but I did appreciate that both the introduction and the translator's note of this edition addressed these issues and contextualized (but didn't apologize or make excuses for) them. Also, Esmeralda is a pretty classic damsel in distress character who would literally rather die than be without a man that she literally just met. This was particularly disappointing to me, who grew up watching the amazing and bad-ass Esmeralda in the Disney animated film. Again, there were times when this was easier to ignore than others, but overall this is one of those "product of its time" books which should be viewed with a critical lens when it comes to representation of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Plot
It is true, there are times when Hugo kind of trips up the flow of the story-- the large chunks about Paris are perhaps the most egregious example, but you can also see it when, literally in the middle of the climax of the story, we get an entire chapter where the king is going over some receipts and whining about his advisors. Still, the pacing is great and pretty well balanced throughout. The slow burn of the first half really (really) lets you settle into the setting, thoroughly describing time and place, and establishing the city as a character in an of itself. Then the second half hits you with the "murder", the trial, the first escape, Quasimodo's half-crazed and triumphant "sanctuary!", then the siege of the cathedral, the second escape, and finally, the parallel deaths of Esmeralda and Frollo.
Setting
Although the setting is such an important part of the story, and in fact the most important part of the story according to Hugo, I never felt like I was fully appreciating the long chapters on the layout of Paris. I think Book 3, particularly "A Bird's Eye View of Paris" was the worst one for me. I really tried to get on board, but when he starting listing every gate in every wall, giving me the history of each important building and business, and describing in detail how a prince might set up his palace, I was lost. It was such an overwhelming amount of really minute detail that my eyes starting glazing over. It felt like reading a map, and made me feel like Hugo could have saved about 50 pages by just drawing a map of Medieval Paris and including that in the beginning (it probably have even helped me visualize the setting better anyway). I understand that these sections were very important to Hugo, are big part of why this book is what it is, but after a certain point, it started to take away from the story for me.
Conclusion
Overall, I really loved this book and I will probably be returning to it in the future. The dry, overly-descriptive chapters on the layout of Paris, as well as the problematic aspects of Esmeralda's character, will keep this from being a 5 star book for me, but I would still recommend reading it keeping those things in mind.
Characters
I did not have any neutral feelings about any of the characters, I either loved them and wanted so badly for them to escape the fates I knew were coming (Esmeralda and Quasimodo), or I wanted them to die in a fire (Frollo and Pheobus). The only exceptions to this were perhaps Gringoire and Jehan, who I thought were just mildly annoying but since they were important connective tissue between the goings-on in the church and the Cour des Miracles, I never really minded when they were "on screen."
There were, obviously, racist connotations to many of the characters, and Hugo's consistent use of the g*psy slur and obvious ignorance about actual Traveler culture was problematic to say the least (not to mention his obvious disdain for anyone who was not French and Catholic in the first Cour des Miracles scene). At times this was pretty pronounced, and it became hard for me, in the 21st century, to ignore it- but I did appreciate that both the introduction and the translator's note of this edition addressed these issues and contextualized (but didn't apologize or make excuses for) them. Also, Esmeralda is a pretty classic damsel in distress character who would literally rather die than be without a man that she literally just met. This was particularly disappointing to me, who grew up watching the amazing and bad-ass Esmeralda in the Disney animated film. Again, there were times when this was easier to ignore than others, but overall this is one of those "product of its time" books which should be viewed with a critical lens when it comes to representation of race, ethnicity, and gender.
Plot
It is true, there are times when Hugo kind of trips up the flow of the story-- the large chunks about Paris are perhaps the most egregious example, but you can also see it when, literally in the middle of the climax of the story, we get an entire chapter where the king is going over some receipts and whining about his advisors. Still, the pacing is great and pretty well balanced throughout. The slow burn of the first half really (really) lets you settle into the setting, thoroughly describing time and place, and establishing the city as a character in an of itself. Then the second half hits you with the "murder", the trial, the first escape, Quasimodo's half-crazed and triumphant "sanctuary!", then the siege of the cathedral, the second escape, and finally, the parallel deaths of Esmeralda and Frollo.
Setting
Although the setting is such an important part of the story, and in fact the most important part of the story according to Hugo, I never felt like I was fully appreciating the long chapters on the layout of Paris. I think Book 3, particularly "A Bird's Eye View of Paris" was the worst one for me. I really tried to get on board, but when he starting listing every gate in every wall, giving me the history of each important building and business, and describing in detail how a prince might set up his palace, I was lost. It was such an overwhelming amount of really minute detail that my eyes starting glazing over. It felt like reading a map, and made me feel like Hugo could have saved about 50 pages by just drawing a map of Medieval Paris and including that in the beginning (it probably have even helped me visualize the setting better anyway). I understand that these sections were very important to Hugo, are big part of why this book is what it is, but after a certain point, it started to take away from the story for me.
Conclusion
Overall, I really loved this book and I will probably be returning to it in the future. The dry, overly-descriptive chapters on the layout of Paris, as well as the problematic aspects of Esmeralda's character, will keep this from being a 5 star book for me, but I would still recommend reading it keeping those things in mind.
This book was a struggle to get through. I read several reviews that said the first half of the book is harder than the first half. This is true, but the second half of the book was not easy either. The good news is that it's relatively easy to tell when Hugo is writing about something that you won't have to remember to get the story. He even provides summaries and conclusions to some of his longer tangents, such as the chapter on the architecture and layout of medieval Paris.
I did not find any of the characters worth caring about. And despite the American title, this is not a book about Quasimodo. He plays a big part, but maybe not even the biggest part. I was glad when the book was over.
I did not find any of the characters worth caring about. And despite the American title, this is not a book about Quasimodo. He plays a big part, but maybe not even the biggest part. I was glad when the book was over.
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Personally? I found it overwrought and, in the usual style of a Hugo novel, filled with unnecessary digressions. It also dehumanizes poor Quasimodo and romanticizes poverty (another issue Hugo novels tend to have).
The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831. It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.
From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the hanuted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.
He made the cathedral the centrepiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendour might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.
Let me just start by saying holy crap is this book depressing. I had seen the Disney movie, and while I assumed they had lightened things up a bit, because that's what Disney does, I had not realized just how much they'd lightened it up. I honestly thought that, at the very least, Esmeralda wouldn't actually get hanged. Right up until the last second, I kept expecting something to happen to prevent it, whether Phoebus or something else. But then all of a sudden, it was done. So there was that. Other things that Disney modified, glossed over, or just plain cut out include:
~ Esmeralda and Quasimodo did not become friends. Although he was in love with her, she really wanted nothing to do with his hideous self.
~ Phoebus and Esmeralda did not fall in love. He saw her dancing, and became enamoured, and they had one date, where they almost slept together before Frollo went nuts and stabbed Phoebus (for which Esmeralda took the fall). Although Phoebus did eventually recover, he went back to his former life and fiancée, gave pretty much no second thought to Esmeralda, and ultimately ends up married, while Esmeralda pines for his lame self until she dies.
~ Interestingly, Frollo is much less outright evil in the book. Most Disney villains are pretty one-dimensionally bad, but they're also generally kind of goofy, laughable, and almost endearing despite their badness. Frollo was just a horrible horrible character, with n redeeming qualities at all, which was quite unusually dark for a Disney villain. The Frollo in the book really exemplifies some of those grays mentioned in the blurb, and is just generally a much more human character. Extremely flawed, certainly, but not outright evil.
~ And various other bit characters, but those are the main ones.
So all that said, I actually got really into this. It's actually a much better read than Les Misérables. That one is just full of tangential musings, and endless descriptions that, while beautifully written, really drag you out of the story. Les Misérables also just has such a huge scope and so many characters that it's kind of hard to keep enough track of what's going on to really identify with any of them. Hunchback, on the other hand, while it certainly does have some of that, does not have nearly as much of it, so you're able to get right into the thick of it, and I really did, especially toward the end. There's action, romance, intrigue, all the good stuff, and so much more depth than most modern writing.
I do feel, though, that his chapter about the cathedral (and yes, there is an entire chapter devoted entirely to describing the cathedral) should be included in the reading for FYP when they discuss church architecture. I didn't really like having it dropped in the middle of a story I was trying to read, but even at that, I could appreciate what a fantastic tribute to the cathedral it was, and really gives you the feel of what a Gothic cathedral entails. So yeah. Pretty much any kind of course that touches at all on church and/or Gothic architecture should totally include that chapter in the readings.
From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the hanuted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.
He made the cathedral the centrepiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendour might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.
Let me just start by saying holy crap is this book depressing. I had seen the Disney movie, and while I assumed they had lightened things up a bit, because that's what Disney does, I had not realized just how much they'd lightened it up. I honestly thought that, at the very least, Esmeralda wouldn't actually get hanged. Right up until the last second, I kept expecting something to happen to prevent it, whether Phoebus or something else. But then all of a sudden, it was done. So there was that. Other things that Disney modified, glossed over, or just plain cut out include:
~ Esmeralda and Quasimodo did not become friends. Although he was in love with her, she really wanted nothing to do with his hideous self.
~ Phoebus and Esmeralda did not fall in love. He saw her dancing, and became enamoured, and they had one date, where they almost slept together before Frollo went nuts and stabbed Phoebus (for which Esmeralda took the fall). Although Phoebus did eventually recover, he went back to his former life and fiancée, gave pretty much no second thought to Esmeralda, and ultimately ends up married, while Esmeralda pines for his lame self until she dies.
~ Interestingly, Frollo is much less outright evil in the book. Most Disney villains are pretty one-dimensionally bad, but they're also generally kind of goofy, laughable, and almost endearing despite their badness. Frollo was just a horrible horrible character, with n redeeming qualities at all, which was quite unusually dark for a Disney villain. The Frollo in the book really exemplifies some of those grays mentioned in the blurb, and is just generally a much more human character. Extremely flawed, certainly, but not outright evil.
~ And various other bit characters, but those are the main ones.
So all that said, I actually got really into this. It's actually a much better read than Les Misérables. That one is just full of tangential musings, and endless descriptions that, while beautifully written, really drag you out of the story. Les Misérables also just has such a huge scope and so many characters that it's kind of hard to keep enough track of what's going on to really identify with any of them. Hunchback, on the other hand, while it certainly does have some of that, does not have nearly as much of it, so you're able to get right into the thick of it, and I really did, especially toward the end. There's action, romance, intrigue, all the good stuff, and so much more depth than most modern writing.
I do feel, though, that his chapter about the cathedral (and yes, there is an entire chapter devoted entirely to describing the cathedral) should be included in the reading for FYP when they discuss church architecture. I didn't really like having it dropped in the middle of a story I was trying to read, but even at that, I could appreciate what a fantastic tribute to the cathedral it was, and really gives you the feel of what a Gothic cathedral entails. So yeah. Pretty much any kind of course that touches at all on church and/or Gothic architecture should totally include that chapter in the readings.
Great story, awful book. I get why it is a classic, but it was honestly hard for me to get through. And I read War and Peace! Too much pontificating about meaningless things, exposition on meaningless characters and the main characters weren't even fully fleshed out. But, the bare bones story is quite beautiful. This should have been a short story! I'm disappointed in you Victor, I didn't think you'd be a one-hit wonder.
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Amazing. I mean, I have watched the Disney movie so many times (Alan Menken's score for that is one of his best, you can't change my mind) and I have read a shorter version when I was a kid - terrified me to weeks of nightmares but it was still great. The actual, real book was so much better than I remembered and expected it to be. It wasn't as slow-paced with difficult language as, say, Charlotte Brontë (whom I love, don't get me wrong) and there are about as many characters in this one book as there are in the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire without things getting confusing and too much.
Slight spoiler warning, I don't mention any names, but a few events.
The feminism of this heals my heart (after recently having read the Chronicles of Narnia): there is a plutonic marriage (that shit is hardly acceptable today, nevermind when this book was written - don't take my word for it, I'm no expert on the 1800s), a man stands up for a woman about to get raped and not once (to the best of my recollection) did someone look down on or underestimate a woman just because she's female.
Slight spoiler warning, I don't mention any names, but a few events.
The feminism of this heals my heart (after recently having read the Chronicles of Narnia): there is a plutonic marriage (that shit is hardly acceptable today, nevermind when this book was written - don't take my word for it, I'm no expert on the 1800s), a man stands up for a woman about to get raped and not once (to the best of my recollection) did someone look down on or underestimate a woman just because she's female.