the hunchback of notre dame victor hugo pages

Hugo loved architecture and the Cathedral, with a result that it was restored soon after the book was published. In Hugo’s time, the cathedral had been substantially damaged (windows, statutes, art, treasure) in the iconoclastic upheaval of the French revolutionary era and subsequent use for decades as a food warehouse. The book is set in the post-construction, pre-Protestant 1400s, the height of the Cathedral’s condition and of the Catholic Church in France. Hugo visited the Cathedral every day while writing this, in a 6 month final rush because he'd missed the publication deadline. Hugo's book title was simply the name of the Cathedral, 'Notre Dame de Paris', without reference to a Hunchback, which was only added to the English translation. It centers on the Cathedral, not on Quasimodo per se.

If you are an aficionado of Parisian architectural history or the various means by which privileged classes held rights to various sources of income, this is a treasure trove. Along with detailed character development, Hugo develops subthemes (anti-cleric, anti-judiciary, anti-aristocratic, anti-xenophobic) throughout the text. This is NOT the highly-abridged plotline encapsulated in the movies. They are unforgettable because they possess the elemental grandeur of myths and epics.' inventory #16842.Very well read indeed by a talented and well-qualified 'solo' reader.īe prepared to appreciate, and endure, the many themes in this very long book (1200 English pages, 1900 French pages). As AndrE Maurois writes: 'Hugo's characters were to live in the minds of men of all countries and all races. Immensely popular from its original publication to the present day, The Hunchback of Notre - Dame stands as an unsurpassed and enduring literary triumph. In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo. Whether depicting the frenzy of a brutish mob or the agony of a solitary soul, whether capturing the drunken blaze of sunlight or dungeon darkness, Victor Hugo's art never fails in its quest for the immediacy of felt experience. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work which gives full play to the author's brilliant historical imagination, his remarkable powers of description. Against this background Victor Hugo unfolds the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the monstrous hunch back Esmera Ida, the gypsy dancer and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The setting of this extraordinary historical novel is medieval Paris: a city of vividly intermingled beauty and grotesquerie, surging with violent life under the twin towers of its greatest structure and supreme symbol, the cathedral of Notre - Dame. Newly Translated From The French By Walter J.

The hunchback of notre dame victor hugo pages