Book Review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
Name of Book: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Author: Victor Hugo ISBN: 9780451527882 Publisher: Signet Classic Type of book: France, Cathedral, forbidden love, square love, secrets, 1482, Paris Year it was published: 1831 (version I have 1965) Summary: 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. Against this background Victor Hugo unfolds the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the monstrous hunchback; Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest tortured by the specter of his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony, it is a work which gives full plya to the author's brilliant historical imagination, his remarkable powers of description. Whether depicting the frenzy of a brutish mob or hte agony of a solitary soul, whether capturing the drun...