Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

This novel was a disappointing read. Disappointing because Les Miserable was so good.

The tragic story is in itself a good one - and of course with the tragic hero climbing around at the top of Notre Dame as it's main imaginative creation.

The other characters are deeply flawed characters: One

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enormously proud priest - a pompous poet - an angry hysterical poor woman, a violent captain and of course the irritatingly vain Esmeralda.

The writing is full of over-the-top emotions, theatrical outbursts en masse and the characters remain very stereotype. It's very difficult to take serious in any way.

To make matters worse, Hugo decides to insert long chapters on the history of Paris and a detail description of Notre Dame and other historical stuff. Come on, Hugo. Do we have to inspect every single corner of that church?

The Huncback have been retold many times, and it might work very well as an opera or in an very abridged retold version for children. As it is read here - the original story - it's a no go.

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Contrary to popular opinion the novel Le Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo is not primarily about the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo. Quasimodo's role is actually surprisingly small in the story, which makes you wonder why the English translater's chose "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" as the

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translation for the title. Actually, as the original French title would indicate, it is the cathedral itself that is the focus of the book. This is why in the unabridged editions of this book you will find numerous chapters that seemingly have nothing to do with the plot of the story. This is the books weakest point, and it may turn many people away from the book. Once you get into the plot, however, it is iimpossible to put the book down. The characters are intriguing: composer Pierre Gringoire, archdeacon Dom Claude Frollo, once a paragon of virtue now tormented by his corrupt love for a gipsy girl, L'Esmerelda, the naive gipsy dancer, Phoebus, the selfish, egotistical captain of the guards, and of course Qausimodo, a deaf, deformed bellringer. The relationships between these characters are complex and dark but they make an unforgettable story. The story is never, from front to back, a happy one, so if you are looking for a book that makes you "feel good" this is not the one for you. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a good book to read, that is unafraid to deal with the darker side of reality, I highly recommend "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

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Victor Hugo has always wowed me with his ability to arrange language, with his broad cast of characters (who never resemble each other, but who still are believable and have endless amounts of humanity), and with his seemingly effortless flow from plot to subplot to unsuspected and terrific

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endings.

Hunchback is one of those novels that reminds an author why they love to write: the outcome can be phenomenal.

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After reading the first five pages and realizing I was in the hands of a master story teller, I started over, more slowly.
Victor Hugo totally draws readers in - to each plot, location, and to the finest nuances of each character, from wild humor to
the worst human desperations. Most vividly rendered

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in a few words.

Unfortunately, for us tender hearted, he is also the master of horror and does not hesitate to unleash his powers
in many directions.

"The Bird's Eye View of Paris" and Notre-Dame chapters could be greatly enhanced by photographs and illustrations.

1/2 Star missing because of the wholly untimely and boring chapter dominated by the King.

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“Notre-Dame de Paris”, the actual title of this book, is from Hugo’s early phase; it was published in 1831 when he was only 29. Quasimodo the hunchback, La Esmeralda the gypsy dancer, and Claude Frollo the archdeacon are all unforgettable. Bear with it in the beginning, as Hugo takes his time

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setting the stage of Paris in 1482. Less philosophical and learned than his later works, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Just one quote, on love:
“That little brother, without father or mother, that infant which dropped all at once from the sky into his arms, made a new man of him. He perceived that there was something in the world besides the speculations of the Sorbonne and the verses of Homer; that human beings have need of affections; that life without love is but a dry wheel, creaking and grating as it revolves.”

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A beautiful book. Many allegorical themes at play here, most notedly the conflict of printed words over architecture/archaic text. The evolution of information and story, and Hugo is quite remarkable in explaining how the cathedral IS in fact a text, and the war between freedom of speech and

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religious orthodoxy. The characters have a bit of an archetypal role as well. Quasimodo is the man who embodies loyalty and servitude. Claude Frollo is the man who embodies intellectual power. And Phoebus embodies physical beauty, and he is the one Esmeralda chooses. Frollo's a much more sympathetic character in this novel than any screen adaptation, though I'd reccomend the Charles Laughton version, it's quite stellar and Cedric Hardwicke is quite good in it. There are some beautiful passages and all in all, once you've finished you feel like you've actually read a book.

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In some ways, this reads like an odd book. If you read it for the story involving Esmeralda, the beautiful young gypsy girl, Quasimodo the hunchback bell-ringer and Frollo the archdeacon, you may be put off or annoyed by the digressions into the layout of Paris, or the architecture of Notre Dame,

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or a treatise on architecture in general and why newer isn't always better. For me, I found it created some odd pacing and I wondered if perhaps at one time it was more common to set a scene in such minute detail. But in reading about the book after the fact, I see that in many ways, the story about Esmeralda and company are actually the digressions from the main text, which was Hugo's views about Gothic architecture. Well, it's probably a good thing he put a story around all of that, or it probably would have been a hard sell. (His views, by the way, boil down to "Kids these days! Get off my lawn!")

So all right, back to the story that people actually want to read - the gypsy, the bell-ringer, the handsome captain, the archdeacon, and of course, the goat. While reading, I was a little surprised by how few good guys there were - it was very interesting to see that beauty didn't equate to good in Hugo's world. In fact, the moral of the story might be instead of "all that glitters is not gold," "all that glitters is not only not gold, it's got a sharp edge that was probably dipped in poison." As far as the writing goes, for a novel written in the early 1800s, the story skipped along quite quickly, and although some twists were telegraphed far ahead of time, others weren't at all. Well worth the read.

Recommended for: people who only know the Disney version of the story, those intimately familiar with Paris, people who prefer animals to humans.

Quote: "And then, from morning till night, I have the happiness of passing all my days with a man of genius, who is myself, which is very agreeable."

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A hunchback, a gypsy, a mad priest. A church and a scaffold. Paris is not exactly the city of lights. Peopled by colourful characters, depraved creatures, hopeless beings, the architecture of the city, however, is a sight to behold. And the church of Notre Dame is the most magnificent of all.

I

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enjoyed very much Hugo's writing, including the digressions on the evolution of architecture as a form of “writing” and immortality, as well as the portrayal of the center of the city, street by street. I didn't enjoy the story very much, though – it was carrying martyrdom too far. The priest was vile, the soldier petty, and Esmeralda not just cloying but downright foolish, too. Quasimodo, however, made up for all that – pity he didn't live a happier life.

Though it doesn't hold a candle to Les Mis, I'm still glad to have read this, as I greatly admire Hugo's ability to paint images with words.

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One doesn't review a classic of this stature, but given how well known the story is from other media, here are a few things I didn't expect in the real thing, if you accept the Modern Library anonymous translation as representative of the source material, and some things I did expect.

Unexpected:

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the emphasis on architecture and city planning. Chapters of it. Comparing Paris of the 1400s, 1600s, and 1800s. The pages spent describing Notre Dame itself is but a fraction of what's covered. For the most part, this is not adjacent to the story, as is the lengthy descriptions of whaling in Moby Dick, it's just something Hugo wanted to write essays about. To that extent, it's like reading a Neal Stephenson book, but, for me, of way less interest.

Unexpected: the many chapters of black humor. This is as much a comic novel as something like Catch-22, with a similar emphasis on the crazy but deadly logic of the system of culture and government. Virtually all chapters with Pierre, the poet-philosopher, are comic and he appears more often than Esmeralda or Quasimodo. Literally at the peak of the violence in the assault by the Vagabonds on Notre Dame, Hugo inserts a chapter with the king going over the budget, then taking a tour of his expensive new jail cell, where he and others comment on its solid construction and what it cost, while the occupants plead for mercy to no avail. Then, back to the action.

Unexpected: the centrality of the archdeacon who lusts for Esmeralda. Pretty much everything that happens is the result of his actions. Beyond the obvious bit with Esmeralda, he adopted and placed Quasimodo at Notre Dame, he raised Jehan, a younger brother whose actions enable certain events at important points, he mentored Pierre the poet, who "marries" Esmeralda, and engineers the afore-mentioned assault, and he (the archdeacon) carries out several key action that dooms Esmeralda.

Unexpected: how clearly Esmeralda dooms herself with her love for someone purely because he is handsome and wears a uniform, and how clearly that captain never had any thought but to bed her and leave her. Calling this a romance misses that the only expressions of love present are twisted ones.

Expected: florid writing and overwrought passions. I had hopes when early on, with the following exchange after Esmeralda has rescued Pierre by her marrying him for four years by Vagabond custom. When she makes it clear they will not be bedmates,

"Then you will not have me for your husband?"
The damsel looked at him intently for a moment, and replied "No".
"For your lover?" asked Gringoire.
She pouted her lip and again replied "No."
"For your friend?" continued Gringoire.
She again fixed her eyes steadfastly upon him. "Perhaps" she said after a moment's reflection.

Sadly, most other dialog is much more ornate, and full of swooning and impassioned pleas, etc. The opening chapters almost stopped me in their tracks with a very boring extended sequence involving the crowd attending a mystery (passion play of sorts) at Notre Dame. Eventually our primary characters emerge from a host of names but it's pretty confusing and slow going.

Bottomline: despite chapters that made me wish for an abridged edition, I'm glad I took the time to read this epic tale.

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Welp, *that* was different from the Disney movie. And I loved it. I found the details about the cathedral and the city of Paris both lovely and a bit of a slog, if that's possible, but the story itself was fantastic, with an ending that I both loved and hated and loved to hate. The dark humor

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sprinkled throughout was wonderful and almost all the characters were excellently well-drawn. Esmeralda herself, funnily enough, is the only exception here, whose one-sidedness was doubly annoying - annoying for being one-sided, and also that one side of her character was itself frustratingly simple and meek. Overall, though, I'm thoroughly happy that I read this one, finally.

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This was a fun read. I was unfamiliar with most of the story or the politics, not having seen the Disney version (a lacuna now filled), and came to it mostly spoiler-free. Notre-Dame de Paris was this year’s Big French Classic (following Thérèse Raquin and Le comte de Monte-Cristo), and I’ve

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enjoyed working my way through this delightfully dark, if melodramatic, Gothic Novel. It felt very filmic in the way it set scenes and gathered momentum for its spectacle through imagery, and I mean that as a compliment. And of course, it featured an awesome villain -- entirely believable in his zealous self-righteousness and post facto rationalisations.

Even so, a few portions of this 1831 book were a slog to get through. Not Hugo’s digressions on what 1480s Paris looked like, or his tract on Architecture vs the Printing Press, or the Alchemy subplot that went nowhere -- I was mostly on board with those. The incredibly obvious setups for later “reveals”, on the other hand, did make me check the pagecount. The intervening two centuries or so of media and storytelling do make a difference. I wasn’t too keen on the cheap melodrama, either, or the Manic Pixie Dream Girl -- a trope I tend to shun.

Most of what I disliked about the book can be chalked up to its age (melodrama, unsubtle setups for reveals); and most of what I liked (opinionated author, the setting, the spectacle, and the surprising darkness) I feel are good features to have in novels. Two thumbs up!

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Modern stories have done for me, they really have. As I was reading Hugo's masterpiece, I saw how all the relationships tied together from a very early point, and it seemed oh-so-inevitable and tiresomely predictable. Why? Because I've read books that take what Hugo did more than a century ago and

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have popularised the plot and technique, making it, for want of a better word, kitsch.

But I read on to the end, enjoying myself almost reluctantly. My opinion changed when I reached the chapter about the King; no other writer I can think of would have been so brave to leave the action and excitement of the thieves' revolt to spend a good fifteen pages introducing the king of France, but there's a reason here, and possibly it's the reason for the writing of this book. It's extraordinary. And then I reached the harrowing conclusion, and now I cannot disagree with the critics that say that this is one of the finest stories ever written. I was moved to the point of tears.

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It took a while to get used to Hugo effusive style, and I could have read it happily without the descriptions of the Paris skyline and streets from 600 years ago, but it did capture my attention. I doubted I would be able to read it at all until I was well into it, then it went pretty rapidly. I

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was inspired to read this by a student who compared the original with the Disney movie of her childhood, which I have never seen, in a capstone presentation. Another classic--read at last!

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I listened to this classic narrated by David Case who I thought did a fairly good job of narration. I had also listened to Les Miserables which Case narrated and I wasn’t very impressed with him then but for whatever reason this book seemed better. Of the book itself I was suitably impressed once

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I got over the custom of the time of writing which Hugo emulated in spades i.e. using 10 words where one would have done. This writing style seems well suited to listening to rather than reading as I have also noted with Dickens works.
It is the latter part of the 17th century. Paris is still a walled city but the walls have had to be expanded three times. Anyone who is not Catholic is viewed with suspicion and often put to death. The King Louis Eleventh is not particularly well liked but he has the support of the church and the military. A band of gypsies (or Egyptians as they are called in the book although they doubtless have never seen Africa) lives in the heart of Paris. A young gypsy girl called La Esmeralda entertains crowds by dancing and demonstrating her goat’s tricks. She is lovely and catches the attention of many men including a captain of the Guard (Phoebus) a priest (Archdeacon Claude of Notre Dame) and a disfigured bell ringer (Quasimodo). The priest enlists Quasimodo’s help to capture La Esmeralda but the kidnapping is foiled by Phoebus. Quasimodo is tried and sentenced to some hours in the stocks. La Esmeralda takes pity on him and brings him water ensuring that Quasimodo is her devoted servant ever after. In her turn La Esmeralda is hopelessly in love with Phoebus who saved her and when he makes an assignation with her she gladly goes although she had sworn to remain a virgin until she could find her parents. (La Esmeralda had been brought up by the gypsies but not born to them.) When the priest heard of the assignation he was overcome with jealousy and followed Phoebus. He hid in the room where they were to meet and when he saw Phoebus and La Esmeralda embracing he sprang out and attacked Phoebus. La Esmeralda fainted and the priest escaped out the window before the Watch could appear. Thus La Esmeralda was charged with the attack on Phoebus (who did not die although La Esmeralda was told he had) and sentenced to hang. She was brought in front of Notre Dame before hanging and Quasimodo snatched her up and claimed sanctuary for her. Despite this aid La Esmeralda does end up on the gallows and is hung. Her fate is even more tragic in that minutes before she had finally reconnected with her mother who had lived as a recluse in Paris ever since her infant daughter had been kidnapped. The priest and Quasimodo also had tragic ends. Love does not conquer all.
Definitely the best person in the book is Quasimodo. His body may be disfigured but his heart is pure. If this were a fairy tale La Esmeralda would have transformed him into a handsome prince with a kiss and they would have lived happily ever after. But Hugo doesn’t do happy endings it seems.

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A Classic Romance

On my themed reading list, The Hunchback of Notre Dame should have been in another category (e.g. A Book More Than One Hundred Years Old) because this is not a romance novel. At some point in a romance both parties in said romance have to love each other. Not only is this

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requirement is never fulfilled, it was destined to fail due to the limitations of the novel's protagonists.

The main characters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame are each flawed - either naive about love (Esmeralda), incapable of being loved (Quasimodo), incapable of love (Phoebus) or forbidden to love (Frollo). Each person in this quadrangle loves someone else within it who does not return their love. Three will pay the ultimate price for their attachment (four if you agree with Hugo's humorous view of Phoebus's fate). Although their destinies are evident at the outset of each romance, what makes the novel worth reading is the accumulated tragedy that results from Hugo's interweaving of each character's individual tale.

Like Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame suffers from Hugo's verbosity, which is particularly noticeable at climactic moments. At these times a character hesitates to act or launches into an extended (and unrealistically lengthy) dialogue. Hugo might have thought this generated suspense; for me, it had the opposite effect. The novel is also a good candidate for abridgement. There are several chapters, such as both chapters of Book III and the additions to the 8th edition, which are devoid of plot and can be skipped without any impairment in understanding or enjoying the novel. The introduction to my edition discusses Hugo's efforts to control the profits from his novel, and these chapters are evidence that the narrative suffered for his efforts.

Despite these complaints, I enjoyed the novel - it just needs to be read with an understanding that it was written in a time that it didn't compete with myriad entertainment alternatives and an acceptance of the deleterious effects of that environment.

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One of my all-time favorites. Sadly underrated and overlooked. I think it's Hugo's best, most full work.

Victor Hugo is so long-winded and overly detailed. I had to skim through every other chapter where he describes the layout of the city. I got so bored working my way through all that!

A good classic but somehow drifted off away from the real plot. I know that the descriptive language was suppose to make you imagine that you're in that place but somehow I find that less enjoyable.

Not sure if it was the narrator or the story itself but after listening to 2 hours of this audio I couldn't take it anymore. If it weren't for the Disney movie I really would have had no clue what was going on in the story. Sad because I've really like a lot of the other classics that I've done

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recently on audio - this just wasn't meant to be.

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Extremely underrated. Hugo's most famous work is without a doubt Les Mis but I can never figure out why. Hunchback is beautiful and tragic and lovely and heartbreaking. Richly detailed but not to the point of tedium. Dramatic characters but still beleivable. It's a kaleidoscope of emotion and

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fulfills everything you could want in a book. My all time favourite.

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Great! Fast paced and terrific! See and then watch the movie for a different interpretation!

I became very tired of the architecture and culture of 14th century Paris before I finished this book. It was good reading when Hugo got down to the business of the story. I was so disappointed in the heroine, Esmeralda, that I didn't mind the ending so much. All in all, a pretty depressing cast of

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characters. Apparently, Hugo didn't think much of mankind. He did however, make the entire 15th century come alive. Something I think was unusual in the early 1800's when this was written. It made me glad to be alive now and not then.

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Yet another great read by victor hugo. So much underlying meaning that still transforms to today alongside a great story on the surface. The struggles of inner vs outer beauty and acceptance will always be relatable, no matter the generation.

Hugo is too long-winded and overly detailed. I was majorly bored with his heavy detail on a building or a road...so many details that they often detracted from the story.