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micholas 's review for:
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Well, it’s no surprise that every adaptation has to lop a couple hundred pages off this thing, slam characters together (add characters?!), change the ending, whatever else. Even more so than Les Mis, with its massive Waterloo and sewers of Paris detours, this thing seems to ramble. Perhaps that’s because its tighter focus and smaller narrative throws the asides into starker relief. Hugo’s being some thirty years junior to the Victor who wrote that larger novel is everywhere apparent—he’s more conservative, especially in his estimation of the poor, the rabble, and what whips them into riot; he’s less capable with his big Romantic plot twists; and while already with his first success Hugo has his penchant for this peculiar narrative flourish, reintroducing characters well known to the reader as strangers before revealing halfway through a chapter that we’ve known them all along, he does so more frequently and with less cause. And with more humor! It’s often quite a funny book, especially when Gringoire is around, up until about the last hundred and fifty pages. Which, speaking of, the violent break from the rest of the story ties up all the foreshadowed twists, but it leaves certain themes dangling in an unsatisfactory way. There’s much misplaced love around Paris in the 15th century, where men are unloveable for the hearts or unloveable for their faces, andQuasimodo and Frollo and Phoebus and Esmeralda seem to want us interrogate all that. These interrogations are cut short by nighttime escapes, showers of molten lead and a big, sweaty, eleventh-hour reveal. Well, Hugo gives up the game in his introduction: he wanted to write a novel about architecture. It’s probably for this reason that his characters have all the suppleness of carved stone.
Read the Sturrock’s translation for Penguin, which is fine, though the intervening decades would require an update.
Read the Sturrock’s translation for Penguin, which is fine, though the intervening decades would require an update.