The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Everybody has heard of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and everybody has heard of Quasimodo, the novel’s namesake (in the English version of the title anyway), and everybody has heard of Quasimodo’s cry of “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Since the existence of a version of this story in the form of an animated family film, something decent people would let their children watch, has been tolerated, I’m guessing that not everybody has actually read this book.

That being said, this is a fascinating story (…for adults.)  Hugo wove some colorful characters who are continuously crossing paths, their lives intertwining, into the backdrop of a past Paris about which our disembodied narrator seems to be an expert. The setting is crucial to the story with the Notre-Dame cathedral as almost a character itself, and few details seem to have been spared.

The intensity of the raw human emotion, however, is even stronger than that of the detailed setting. The idiosyncrasies of each character are extreme: Quasimodo’s ugliness and pain, La Esmeralda’s innocence and beauty, archdeacon Frollo’s obsession and hypocrisy. They are all caricatures, but curiously believable ones with pasts and experiences that have shaped who they are. While the emotional natures of the characters may be somewhat exaggerated, they are rarely comic, with the exception, perhaps, of Pierre Gringoire, a philosopher-playwright who functions not unlike a Shakespearean fool.

That is not to say that much of the story is not amusing. The style is engaging and even entertaining. While I felt like I probably missed a lot of satire by being less in the know than a contemporary reader, there was still plenty of it to latch onto, proving that there are many aspects of human foolishness that never go out of fashion.

The plot of the novel is driven largely by the passions of the characters and by the ironies of a basically unjust world. (Anyone who wants to believe that the world is fair is likely to totally hate this book.) It is also characterized by a tremendous amount of violence, to which the writer/narrator seems curiously immune. Folks are tortured, hanged, smashed and crushed and meet other equally bad ends, and the complete lack of genuine justice is prominent enough to serve as a sort of violence itself.

Despite all of that horror, I was surprised at how much fun this book was to read. I had expected it to be a somewhat dry example of what we are told is important literature, but instead found it quite wonderful. I was disappointed with La Esmeralda, who I thought was kind of stupid, but had never heard of Pierre Gringoire, who I found to be a delightfully amusing character. While (minor spoiler alert) the ending of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is a bit of a bummer, the intensity and pace of the story kept me turning pages from the inviting beginning right up to that bitter end.

You might also like The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

 

 

Coming soon: On Literature by Umberto Eco and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

 

 

A Year of Books I Should Have Read by Now