The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (audio): second half

Posted on April 3, 2013 by pagesofjulia

hunchbackIn brief: better than the first half.

In the first half of this classic novel, I felt there was a bit much explication of aspects less interesting to me personally: most to the point, the architecture of Paris and the history of that architecture. This turns out to be a historical facet that does not fascinate me. If you feel otherwise, enjoy. I said then that Hugo’s strengths lay in the narrative of his story, especially in dialogue; and it seemed to me that this second half had more of that. I am still refraining from plot summary, since that question is well answered by the internet at large. So, briefly, in this second half our characters meet their fates. La Esmeralda, Quasimodo, Claude Frollo, Phoebus, Gringoire and Sister Gudule are for me the central characters, and each comes to a resolution by the end; Hugo wraps up very neatly in that regard.

I found the story interesting – not riveting, but engaging in that I cared about the fates of these characters. It moved a little too slowly to be called riveting, but I did remain mostly attentive. (The description of Parisian building styles through the centuries was not entirely absent in this latter half of the book, so I did still zone out some.) Gringoire’s comic soliloquies are among the best moments; and the Archdeacon’s depravity was shocking and certainly absorbing. I think he easily equals the sociopaths featured on Criminal Minds. One of my observations on finishing this book is that 15th-century French society unfortunately allowed for such crazed and dangerous behaviors if one only held a high position in the church.

This is mild praise, you realize. The Hunchback of Notre Dame struck me as a fine story, but unremarkable. And yet Victor Hugo is a big name, and this one of his best-known works (I am not excited about Les Miserables!), so what have I missed? Well, for one thing, there is this assertion that I got from Wikipedia:

Hugo introduced with this work the concept of the novel as Epic Theatre. A giant epic about the history of a whole people, incarnated in the figure of the great cathedral as witness and silent protagonist of that history. The whole idea of time and life as an ongoing, organic panorama centered on dozens of characters caught in the middle of that history. It is the first novel to have beggars as protagonists.

Notre Dame de Paris was the first work of fiction to encompass the whole of life, from the King of France to Paris sewer rats, in a manner later co-opted by Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and many others, including Charles Dickens.

And when put in this perspective, I see its value a little more clearly. Upon its publication in 1831 there were no novels like this; okay. On the other hand this is Wikipedia (and there is a sentence fragment in the above quotation, oh the horror), so, grain of salt. Certainly I can see how this is a great, sweeping view of 15th century France, as stated involving both the King and the beggars, and I am happy to nod to the precedent set even if this is not my favorite example of the genre.

The narrator, David Case, turned out to be perfectly fine and appropriate. I liked the different voices he plays for the very different characters of Gringoire (comic, self-important, whinging), the Archdeacon (dark, conflicted), Esmeralda (sort of a wilting lily), and Quasimodo (deaf). He gave the piece flavor.

In the end, though, I shrug at this lengthy audiobook and move on without looking back.

Rating: 5 gargoyles.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

Teaser Tuesdays: Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland

Posted on April 2, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

crossing

I am pleased with the early chapters of this memoir, in which the author travels back to Europe to hunt down her mother’s long-lost love, from whom she was separated during World War II. Today’s teaser concerns the mother’s family, Jews who lived on the border between France and Germany in a region that changed hands between those two countries frequently, confusing their sense of heritage.

…for Sigmar, returning to French-controlled Mulhouse after [World War I] – a German war veteran with a new German bride – proved difficult too, with anti-German sentiment in France running so high. Feeling even less welcome as Germans in France than as Jews in Germany, Sigmar and Alice crossed the Rhine once again to settle and start a family in Freiburg.

This is a nuance I had not considered before, and drives home the displacement of Jews in this era.

What are you reading this week?

Filed under: tuesday teasers | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan

Posted on April 1, 2013 by pagesofjulia

The author of Stories and its followups, Stories II and Stories V!, shares a memoir of Appalachian boyhood filled with the requisite hardships but ultimately redemptive.

crapalachia

Scott McClanahan centers Crapalachia on two characters of his West Virginia youth who rule over much of the narrative–his Grandma Ruby, an ornery, fantastical mother of 13 (or so) children who also photographed dead people, and his uncle Nathan, who had cerebral palsy and enjoyed listening to the radio preacher and having six-packs of beer poured down his feeding tube. We also meet his schoolboy friends, like Little Bill, an eventual roommate with obsessive-compulsive disorder and a destructive crush on a girl down the street.

Crapalachia is an unusual story told in an unusual fashion, peppered with second-person references, advice to the reader on how to live, how to remember and forget. The attentive reader will also appreciate McClanahan’s “Appendix and Notes” for its revelation of where he’s twisted the truth (as he remembers it) to suit the story he wanted to tell. Like many memoirists, McClanahan is concerned with the nature of memory, its credibility and value. He sometimes gets mired in the unpleasant, cringeworthy details of life, then pans out for grand, loving, hopeful statements. This is a gritty look at life–in Appalachia, yes, but also in a universal sense. Historical detail turns what looked to be a memoir of childhood into the subtitle’s promised “biography of a place.” In the end, despite various tragedies, this poetic, rambling series of remembrances is surprisingly optimistic.

This review originally ran in the March 26, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 gallstones.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

book beginnings on Friday: Yellowstone, Land of Wonders by Jules Leclercq; with notes

Posted on March 29, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

yellowstone

I am having a difficult time deciding where to “begin” this book, because it opens with not just a foreword or introduction, but:

  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgements
  • Translators’ Introduction
  • Translation and Editorial Method
  • A Note on the Illustrators
  • Preface (by the original author), and…
  • Chapter 1.

All of which is not a problem for me; I read each of these sections happily (most were 2-3 pages); but how to design today’s book beginning? Let’s start with chapter 1:

In 1871 the American geologist Hayden revealed the existence of one of the most phenomenal regions on earth. It was named the “Land of Wonders.”

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

As I learned in the copious introductory remarks, this is the first-ever English translation in full of an 1886 publication in French, La Terre des Merveilles, by a renaissance man who spent 10 days in Yellowstone in 1883. It is billed as being remarkable and unique in many ways, and I am looking forward to it.

In the first few pages alone I learned several interesting pieces of trivia, including that Yellowstone is roughly one third the size of Belgium (at least as they both looked in 1886!); that geyser is an Icelandic word; and the definition of the word ‘diadem’ (I was thinking something like jewelry or a tiara, and I was right). And speaking of notes – as I’ve written before, I keep notes while I read: passages I want to quote, words or concepts I want to look up, thoughts I want to include in a review. I have also written before about footnotes; and on this subject I have some observations to make here. For one thing, the endnotes are copious. By the time chapter 2 ended on page 21, I had been cued to reference 47 endnotes. That’s two-and-a-quarter per page! And they are endnotes, meaning they occur at the end of the book rather than throughout; and while some direct the reader to a source for the information given, some make substantive contributions to the text, so that I can’t know to always refer to them or always ignore them; and this makes for a great deal of flipping around. Also, while we’re keeping track, I’ve made only 4 notes myself in those 21 pages (plus 6 pages of notes!), so there you are. This is looking like… are you ready for it?… a noteworthy read.

And what are you reading this weekend?

Filed under: book beginnings | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Iodine by Haven Kimmel

Posted on March 28, 2013 by pagesofjulia

iodineThis is my new favorite author. I can’t even tell you… I want to read this book aloud to strangers and shout and cry. I adore her. What a powerful book, and story, and what wordsmithing.

I will tell you very little about the plot of Iodine. Its protagonist is a young woman named Trace, who also goes by Ianthe. The perspective shifts between a third person view of Ianthe and a third person view of Trace and a first person voice, in which the woman who is both women narrates; and she is the quintessential unreliable narrator. She relates memories and then states that they never happened. Her story is revealed slowly and disjointedly, in such stingy scraps that I had to go back and reread, trying to wring out the detail; but the effect is more tantalizing than awkward or confusing the way mixed-up timelines can be.

It is a disturbing story. Trace, along with the other characters we slowly come to know, has a history that upsets us. There is a strong thread of incestuous and otherwise inappropriate sexual longings running through this book (as we saw in those opening lines). Be prepared to be a little uncomfortable at times; but oh, the payoff. And again I give you the beautiful language:

Her red hair was curled and teased and sprayed into an elaborate dome; there were waves and… like the outline of paisleys, it was busy, stiff, bright hair. Not the red she was born with – this was the color of a ripe cantaloupe mixed with blood.

Kimmel has many strengths. Her prose is also poetry. She can characterize a minor player in just a few lines so crisply that I recognize a thoroughly unique and yet familiar man or woman.

Scherring was less a man than a character in a short story, and it was a story Trace rather liked; she liked how the years had disappointed him, and ruined that perfect family, and revealed gin to be poison to the liver.

Her characters are very real, straight from a mundane and yet terrifying Americana, and their lives are both disturbing and everyday.

Iodine is far more a psychological thriller than was Something Rising. There is more Patricia Highsmith here and less Tennessee Williams. There is also definitely something of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River, although the protagonists of the two books are different in many ways.

One aspect of Iodine that was also present in Something Rising is a study of literature, in this case of Greek myths, of archetypes, of Freud and Jung: several characters are deeply mired in academia, speaking in a language of myth & archetype, which makes for a beautiful and strange little subculture that they live in. Trace/Ianthe is both very much a part of this world, and also outside of it. I found this erudite framing element to the story very charming and also a little ridiculous, which I think is how Kimmel intended to portray it. It certainly made me interested in reading some of what Trace reads; but not all of it! (I will be looking up Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron, finally, after seeing it referred to in various places before this book.)

I think I’ve made a hash of this review. I don’t want to say much about the plot, and I can’t do Kimmel’s extraordinary talent justice. She has a lovely way with words; I would read her stories about absolutely anything, but find this damaged, disturbed microcosm of the American Midwest especially enthralling. I was riveted throughout, and upon finishing, had to just sit and absorb the effect of this story. My fascination with Kimmel continues and she remains highly recommended.

Rating: 9 black dogs.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , | 5 Comments »

books from Fil

Posted on March 27, 2013 by pagesofjulia

I thought it was time for a feature post on my most frequent book gifter. He does an excellent job of selecting reading material for me; I’m sure you will recognize the themes from the list below. Nothing he’s given me (that I’ve read) has been less than great, yet. But I still have many of them to read.

I first met Fil at the bike shop where he works, and where I would later work alongside him. That would have been, oh, almost ten years ago. The first book gifts he got me were back when we were coworkers, for my birthday, I’m fairly sure; and those were bike themed. Since then, we have also shared interests in Mexico and in travel in general. I’ve made this list in vague alphabetical order, from memory, and I’m not completely sure that it’s exhaustive, but it’s a great start:

six days

Six Days of Madness by Ted Harper: a 1993 book about six-day racing in the United States in the “Golden Age” of cycling, the 1890’s. I read it, pre-blog, and LOVED it: track racing is obscure enough, but six-day racing is an extra-special, rare reading subject.

bicycle racing

Bicycle Racing in the Modern Era: a VeloNews production covering 25 years of pro cycling in multiple disciplines (road, track, mountain, cyclocross, BMX), and the beauty of it is that the 25 years covered are 1975-2000 – meaning that Lance Armstrong has only a bit part. In a totally Lance-saturated world, this was inexpressibly refreshing; and I learned a lot. I read it pre-blog.

londonderry

Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride by Peter Zheutlin: the story of Annie Londonderry’s bike ride (ostensibly) around the world incorporates adventure, women’s issues, world travel & cultures, as well as the Golden Age of cycling. There is even a thread running through it regarding women’s clothing and clothing reform – interesting stuff.

spokesongs

Spokesongs: Bicycle Adventures on Three Continents by Willie Weir: a series of anecdotes by a man who cycle-tours several continents. A focus on the developing world makes for some interesting cultural tidbits.

geese

I’ll Gather My Geese by Hallie Crawford Stillwell: the memoir of a woman who headed off into the unknown of far southwest Texas in the 1910’s to work as a schoolteacher and live on a ranch. Sounds good! I just haven’t gotten to it yet.

fromalaska

From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: Across the Americas in Two Years by Michael Boyny: just looking at that gorgeous cover (click to enlarge) makes me anxious to get to this one, a coffee-table book, which I think was technically given to Husband but Husband does not read… It’s the story of a couple that traveled the length of the Americas in an old pick-up truck, and promises “superb pictures.”

mangostreet

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: an exceptionally beautiful and powerful collection of short stories that might be poems. Not one to miss! And Fil had never read it; so I was able to recommend it back to him. Note that this edition is extra-special because of the lovely introduction (by Cisneros) that is included.

volume1volume2

Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens, Volumes I & II: Barnes & Noble claims that “Edgar Allan Poe called it ‘perhaps the most interesting travel book ever published.'” That might do it for me, right there! Husband and I have a special fondness for Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and an 1800’s-era travelogue with that kind of blurb definitely belongs on my book shelf.

cruisers

Cruisers by Jonny Fuego and Michael Ames: another given to Husband, and more of a coffee table book than a cover-to-cover, although I confess I haven’t looked at it much yet. Pictures of beautiful bicycles, of course, do belong on our coffee table. For a little context, here’s Husband on our wedding day on the bike I got him for a wedding present:
weddingbike
I brought Ritchey to the wedding on my cruiser:
tattoopic
Sorry, I got distracted.

solace

The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich: reputed to be a fine, lyrical observation of the American West of the 1970’s. Hopefully – and I think this is Fil’s intention – it will fall in line with the tradition of Edward Abbey and Phil Connors; and more recently, Isabella Bird (see below). Bonus: just the other day, A.Word.A.Day featured Ehrlich for their “thought for the day”:

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

Which is a lovely one.

noblest

The Noblest Invention from Bicycling Magazine: another coffee-table bike book, this one on the history of the bicycle, presumably a celebration of our relationship with two wheels and with lots of good pictures, as well as a well-advertised foreword by Lance Armstrong, who has been inescapable in cycling publications for years – maybe that will change now with his newfound ignominy?

wellville

The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle: I know nothing about this one, and I believe the same goes for Fil; I think it was purchased on the strength of Boyle’s reputation, which I know although I have read none of his yet. So, fair enough, Fil. A reading assignment. Okay.

justride

Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Petersen: “radically practical” sounds like a quite fine way to describe Petersen himself, a personality I’m familiar with through the Rivendell Reader (an occasional serial publication from Rivendell Bicycle Works, Petersen’s company – you can see a few issues here). He is the definitive retro-grouch when it comes to bicycles, and my reaction to his philosophies is mixed: much of what he says makes sense (and I have a little retro-grouch, even a little Luddite, running through me), but some of it seems to be clearly grouchiness for its own sake. Fil had already become ambivalent about this book by the time he gifted it to me! And I haven’t looked at it yet; but I will. I have David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries on my shelf, too (also a gift, from another friend), despite BikeSnob‘s relentless fun-making of him, and I may as well get all sides of this story! I suspect I will fall in line with the majority of Petersen’s directives, at least.

711

Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Cyclists Took on the World – and Won by Geoff Drake: the story of professional road racing in the pre-Lance era, back when all their gear was recognizable and Americans were new on the scene. I can read that.

adventures

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird: just recently read, of course. I have an idea that this might make a fine comparison read next to The Solace of Open Spaces, above, which is similar in being a woman’s perspective on the natural beauty and benefits of the American West, but from precisely 100 years later. Perhaps that’s the next Fil-gifted read I shall look forward to. Hm. I am also most attracted (in making this list) by I’ll Gather My Geese, From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (who can resist the Poe endorsement!). In other words, Fil is still doing well around here! Oh, and I feel I should get to the David Byrne book, too, and compare it to Bike Snob and Just Ride.

Which books on this list appeal to you especially? Do you have friends who consistently give you books, or consistently give really good gifts, or (lucky you!) both?

Filed under: miscellaneous, musings | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Teaser Tuesdays: The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, again

Posted on March 26, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

hunchback

Yes, I just did this one last week. The good news is that there continues to be text worth quoting! I liked these lines of dialogue:

“The gallows lead to hell.”

“That is a rousing fire.”

“Jehan, Jehan! The end will be bad!”

“The beginning at least will have been good.”

There is something Shakespearean, I think, in this repartee. As I said in my mid-way-through review, Hugo is at his best in narrative (or dialogue!), when he is pithy and entertaining. Still enjoying this one, on the whole.

Filed under: tuesday teasers | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

Posted on March 25, 2013 by pagesofjulia

adventuresI have a friend named Fil who won’t stop bringing me books. I’ve told him how badly my reading is backlogged, but still we can’t have dinner or a drink without bringing me a book, or several. There are worse problems to have. He certainly does a fine job of selecting them, there’s no question about that; I just worry about finding time for them all. This one, however, fit perfectly into a hole in my reading at the time it arrived: I was a little behind and needed a quick read to review for you all here when he brought me this small, slim paperback of 119 pages. Perhaps it’s wrong to choose one’s reading based on length! but sometimes it does go that way. So, enter Isabella Bird.

From a brief bio in the opening pages, I learned that she was born in 1831 in England, and was sickly and in poor health for the first 40 years of her life, until she traveled to Hawaii and climbed a volcano. From there, she realized that outdoor activity was much more her style than were British sickrooms, and she embarked on a different lifestyle. Adventures in the Rocky Mountains is a collection of letters (and excerpts from letters) she sent to a sister back home while tramping around the Rockies, then not yet a part of the United States but a frontier dominated by hard drinking, hard living, and men.

Bird’s writing is remarkable for its lovely, evocative descriptions of natural scenery, as well as its equally evocative, but less praising, descriptions of frontier life. She retains some disdain for the uncivilized dress and manners of some of her neighbors, but before we call her prudish we will note that she was “bagging 14ers” in a time and place when women were scarce, and were hardworking frontier wives rather than adventurers. In other words, despite preferring a well-dressed conversationalist as companion to a ragged and “coarse” one, she was a tough cookie. A quotation from one of her letters graces the front cover: “There’s nothing Western folk admire so much as pluck in a woman…”

Aside from the descriptions of natural beauty and frontier life, I found a third reason to recommend this book: the character of Mr Nugent or ‘Jim’ (never referred to without the ‘single quotation marks’!), and his dog ‘Ring’ (also always so designated). ‘Mountain Jim’ is a well-known ruffian and desperado with no end of violence and criminality in his past – he confides in Bird at one point such atrocities that she can’t bring herself to relate them. But he is also a perfect gentleman, apparently, in the right mood. He is a “countryman” of Bird’s, a wonderful conversationalist, and quite chivalrous as well as respectful of her abilities to be one of the guys. He is described as charmingly as are the Rocky Mountains. For that matter, the less prominent Evans (another very likeable but also alcoholic and problematic frontiersman) gets a similarly colorful character sketch; and the UNlikeable Lyman as well; so really I should add characterization of people generally to Bird’s list of literary talents.

I am going to stop telling you and show you, through a few choice passages, below.

on a sunset:

The sun was setting fast, and against his golden light green promontories, wooded with stately pines, stood out one beyond another in a medium of dark rich blue, while grey bleached summits, peaked, turreted, and snow-slashed, were piled above them, gleaming with amber light. Darker grew the blue gloom, the dew fell heavily, aromatic odours floated on the air, and still the lofty peaks glowed with living light, till in one second it died off from them, leaving them with the ashy paleness of a dead face. It was dark and cold under the mountain shadows, the frosty chill of the high altitude wrapped me round, the solitude was overwhelming, and I reluctantly turned my horse’s head towards Truckee, often looking back to the ashy summits in their unearthly fascination.

on ‘Jim’:

Heavily loaded as all our horses were, ‘Jim’ started over the half-mile of level grass at a hand-gallop, and then throwing his mare on her haunches, pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite of the manifold checks of fording streams, single file, abrupt ascents and descents, and other incidents of mountain travel.

on a sunrise, and the lightening of the world:

There were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and etherealising, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringed with icicles, the strange sough of gusts moving among the pine tops – sights and sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary, beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes.

on a high mountain lake:

I thought how their clear cold waters, growing turbid in the affluent flats, would heat under the tropic sun, and eventually form part of that great ocean river which renders our far-off islands habitable by impinging on their shores.

on society, even where people are scarce:

…in truth, this blue hollow, lying solitary at the foot of Long’s Peak, is a miniature world of great interest, in which love, jealousy, hatred, envy, pride, unselfishness, greed, selfishness, and self-sacrifice can be studied hourly, and there is always the unpleasantly exciting risk of an open quarrel with the neighbouring desperado, whose “I’ll shoot you!” has more than once been heard in the cabin.

Isabella Bird’s story of travel through Colorado Territory in the 1870’s, told in letters to her sister, spans almost precisely three months in time; but it is a lifetime of beautiful, incisive, gorgeously told observations, and we are lucky to have them today.

Rating: 7 breaths of rarefied air.

As usual, thanks Fil!

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

book beginnings on Friday: Iodine by Haven Kimmel

Posted on March 22, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

iodine

This appears to be, as hoped, another amazing Haven Kimmel novel. Check out these opening lines, I tell you:

I never
I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed. Once he realized how I felt he never again let me so much as lean against him while we watched television.

I think it bears pointing out that there is no typo in this excerpt: “I never” is indeed repeated once before the first full sentence. There is an element of dreamscape here.

These captivating first lines (who amongst us doesn’t now want to know more?!) are a fair representation of what’s to come. Our narrator may be the archetype, the quintessence of the unreliable narrator you hear so much about.

Stay tuned. I think this is going to be another great one.

Filed under: book beginnings | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (audio): first half

Posted on March 21, 2013 by pagesofjulia

hunchbackThis is a long book, and listening to it as an audiobook makes it longer still. I’ve been at it a week and a half now and am not quite halfway through, so I thought it might be appropriate to break it into two reviews – to remind myself, as much as anything else.

I will not devote too much space to plot synopsis here; this work has plenty of presence in the public consciousness and a rather thorough Wikipedia article as well. The story within the book most centrally concerns Quasimodo, the eponymous hunchback, and Esmeralda, a beautiful young gypsy woman with several admirers. While the story revolves around these two protagonists and their eventual fates, its range is much larger than that. Between events in the lives of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and the other characters who effect their stories, Hugo describes the architecture of Paris (note the prominence of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the title and in the story) and the history of both the city and its architecture. He connects changes and trends in architecture to changes in culture, and thereby tells a larger story than just that of his characters; this is also a book about Paris and its people in history.

It can get a little dry. I find this reading (listening) experience to be mixed: at its best, Hugo is hilarious, dry, droll, witty, and sketches people and scenes charmingly. At its drier moments, however, my mind wanders as he describes architecture (I confess, not a particular area of personal interest) and the various period styles involved in the Cathedral, etc. I can blank out on this book for 30 minutes at a time, and I am not highly motivated to fight it; I just let Hugo’s words wash over me, gathering the main effect, and wait for Esmeralda et al to reappear and entertain me. While I am a fan of some forms of narrative within descriptive or didactic ramblings (The Perfect Storm being the perfect example of this done beautifully), this is not one of the more effective or enjoyable versions I’ve come across.

The narrator of this version, David Case, has what I assume to be a fine French accent (that is my mother’s area, not mine), but its nasal, whinging nature can be a little trying. I don’t want to give the impression that I am impatient or annoyed with this book (or this narration) on balance; but I do have some criticisms, you see. I turned it off for a few days in favor of MUSIC (what a joy!), but I was glad to get back to it.

I think this is a great story, and a great point of cultural reference, and I am getting some (needed, and appreciated) education on French culture. I am enjoying it – particularly the narrative parts. It takes a little patience and forbearance – a little more than a faster-paced story would – but I believe it will be worth it. More a Dickens than a Lee Child, you see.

Have you read The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Or do you have any other experiences with similar classics: medium-lengthy, verbose and descriptive, a little challenging but worthwhile?

Rating: I’m going to finish it before I judge.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »