Book Review: Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo, the French poet and writer, who wished to change how novels were written and read, wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in the beginning of his career.

In contrast to Les Miserables, which is his more celebrated work, and was written several decades later, Notre-Dame is not only laced with more humor and romance but also stands out as a piece where the young poet in Hugo pours out a ravishing range of similes. Just for the pure magic of his metaphors and similes that make all his descriptions so poetic and so powerful, Notre-Dame is worth a read.

The story itself reads like a fanciful movie, an ugly hunchback, Quasimodo is brought up by a Priest Frollo, the archdeacon of Notre Dame. The hunchback is hence attached to Frollo like a dog to his master.

The English title of The Hunchback of Notre-dame is a misnomer, for the original is called Notre-dame de Paris, and English title lets us assume that it is the story of the Hunchback as hero, while the original title asserts it is story set in Notre Dame and has characters who reside in it, or live in its shadows.

The Priest Claude Frollo, leaving his pursuit of science and philosophy, meanders to a path of unrelenting lust for the gypsy dancer, Esmeralda. A writer, Pierre Gringoire, gets into a set of bizarre circumstances, where a token marriage attaches him to the gypsy. Phoebus, captain of King's Archers, is the object of the affection of Esmeralda herself.

Besides these characters, there is a madwoman who lives in confinement, pining for her lost child, who was carried off by gypsies, and hates Esmeralda. There is the goat Djali, who performs tricks with Esmeralda, Jehan who is Claude Frollo's irreligious brother, King Louis IV - who interacts with Claude on issues of science - and the most important character, who lurks in the background all through, is the Notre Dame itself.

The romances criss-cross through a series of interesting episodes and drama, and that forms the crux of the story that I won't divulge here. Readers will benefit by discovering surprises and mystery for themselves, in process getting enchanted by a story that has been a popular read for centuries now.

What makes this novel a masterpiece, besides the poetic descriptions, is
Hugo's description of the cathedral of Notre Dame and the city of Paris, and his discussion of how the arrival of printing press signaled an end to the importance of architecture as the expressive art of intellectuals.

The views of the author expressed in these pages and pages of delightful reading provide the reader not only with historical and architectural perspective on the buildings in Paris, but also gives us a word image of buildings, roofs, rooms, carvings, modernism, and more. In his commentaries and comparisons between writing and printing as form of expression in contrast to architecture, Hugo unmasks a wide array of issues that the arrival of every new media (TV, Cinema, Internet, Digital Photography in our times for example) bring.

How existing precepts and concepts are revised, how adaptations occur, how each age has its own expression through any of these means - and all Hugo says so passionately about architecture or literature allows us to feel the essence of why we make monuments of stones or words in the first place.

Victor Hugo had great skill in developing characters, and describing their lives over an extended period of time, capturing how situations and people led to certain choices, behavioral changes and the thought process of each. His ability of doing this, in a very detached manner, where narrative is like a camera floating into a room, and staying long enough for a distant observer to watch and identify traits of every person present there, makes him a great novelist. The novel, like all classic reads, looks formidable in size, but can be read at a formidable pace, especially after the first half of the novel is over.

Besides the merits of the novelist, and the beauty of his wordplay, the story itself is a charming one, and has been brought to screen many times. Reading Hugo's two major works allows one to get the same keen insight into French society of the respective times, as does Thackeray and Dickens novels for England and Tolstoy in Russia.

Reading any of these masters takes time, but trust me, it is worth the patience and the effort. Recommended highly.