The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

The year of #BigReads continues for me; here's my second straight book exceeding 500 pages in length. I'm sure you've all heard of Victor Hugo, who more famously penned Les Misérables, and also of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, perhaps best known today as a 1996 Disney movie. Well, here's the original novel. I liked it!

There are plenty of scattered thoughts I have here, but nothing like last time where I rambled for twelve paragraphs just to try to wrap my head around The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It's more that this is a classic book with some well known characters and I feel like I should say a few things about it, but there's no cohesion to anything I feel like saying. Screw it - time for some categories!

Title

The book's original French title is Notre-Dame de Paris, and only when it was translated to English did someone decide to warp that into The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The original title makes much more sense; this is a novel about a number of characters, and Quasimodo is arguably only the third or fourth-most important character in the story, which takes place primarily in and around the big old cathedral of Notre-Dame. So, why name it after the hunchback? Gothic romance, baby. This was 1830 or so, and there was nothing the Brits loved more than a good old monster story. (Think of Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and Dracula - all Victorian era novels with spooky creepy bad guys!) The name stuck throughout the anglosphere, and as such, most people who haven't read this book likely assume it's about, you know, the titular hunchback of Notre-Dame. But again - it really isn't! Mostly. We'll get there.

History

Hugo had a big old boner for medieval French history, and that's probably the entire reason he wrote this book. It takes place in the 1480s, right at the tail end of the Middle Ages before the Renaissance or the Age of Exploration, in Paris. So, get this. Hugo wrote the book around 1830, after the French Revolution(s) had destroyed a lot of Paris. Apparently the very famous cathedral of Notre-Dame was in really rough shape, and had been for decades, when Hugo began writing. And so much of Hugo's goal when writing his story was to instill a sense of historical appreciation in his audience. Common Parisian thought at the time, apparently, was something along the lines of, "hey, there's so much old and dirty and broken shit in this dingy old city of ours. Let's knock it all down and get with the times." And Hugo was all, "cool it, guys. Our city's history is bright and vibrant and worth preserving!"

At any rate, this is likely why there are entire chapters of Hunchback devoted to describing the architecture of Paris, and of Notre-Dame in particular. There were multiple pages just written about stained glass windows. There's a tangent about how there used to be farmland within the city limits. (Note that these big-ass tangents aren't unique to Hunchback; Hugo went off the rails multiple times in Les Misérables to talk about sewer systems, Waterloo, and any number of off-topic subjects.)

These are the parts of the novel that drag the most, and unfortunately, they're all over the first half of the book. If you decide to read this one yourself, please, have no qualms with skimming dozens of pages at a time, particularly in the early going. It gets better! And whether or not Hugo had anything to do with it, the French people eventually came around to respecting their historical landmarks, and Notre-Dame de Paris still stands today. Great!

Characters

Props to Hugo - the guy can craft a memorable character. Even if you haven't read or seen Les Misérables, you're probably at least vaguely aware of the ex-convict Jean Valjean, of the conflicted police officer Javert, and possibly of a handful of other characters. Likewise, even if you haven't read or seen The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I'll assume you're somewhat familiar with Quasimodo the hideous bellringer and Esmeralda the mysterious gypsy dancer. What I love, too, about Hugo's characters is that he fleshes them out into fully realized people with flaws and merits alike. When Disney adapted this story into a movie they made it ore family friendly by substantially cleaning up the ending (in the book, more or less everyone ends up dead) but they also took the complex character of Claude Frollo - perhaps the protagonist of this story, though admittedly a deeply flawed one - and flattened him out into a monstrous villain with no redeeming qualities and no backstory to explain how he became the way he is. Which, hey, fine, this is a ninety-minute movie that kids need to comprehend, so maybe we don't need to get into the whole "chaste priest tormented by sexual longing" angle, but still - Frollo spends the bulk of the book being an overall decent person.

And the rest of the characters are just as complicated. Quasimodo is a sympathetic and tragic figure, hobbled by his condition and deaf from ringing the bells his whole life, but he's also withdrawn and cynical and not overly kind. This makes perfect sense - the city sees him as a monster deserving of ridicule - but it also makes Quasimodo into a perfect antagonist from certain characters' points of view. Isolated, angry - he's the prototypical social outcast.

Meanwhile, Esmeralda is an enchanting gypsy girl with a heart of gold. Her dancing drives Frollo mad with lust and desire, and her gentle kindness toward Quasimodo makes him fall deeply in love with her. But she rejects any advance made by either of these men; instead she's lovestruck by the handsome Captain Phoebus, a knight in shining armor. This makes perfect sense, because Esmeralda is sixteen years old. And who's dumber than a smitten sixteen-year-old girl?

Phoebus, lastly, is older and engaged to somebody else and frankly he's a womanizing piece of shit who doesn't care for Esmeralda at all. But to his credit, he's no flat character either - he did save Esmeralda from being kidnapped early on in the novel. As such, she's smitten enough to pine for him for the remainder of the story, long after the point where he actively ignores and avoids her in public.

And then there are several other minor recurring characters who spice things up by interacting with these four. You've got a bitter, angry woman who hates gypsies because her daughter was stolen by gypsies; you've got Frollo's younger brother, an irresponsible but entirely harmless jerk-off; you've got the self-proclaimed gypsy king, a cutthroat who'll kill any honest man who sets foot in his part of the city, but who ultimately leads a mob of gypsies on a rescue attempt at the book's climax. There's a richness to the web of relationships at play here that you just don't see in many nineteenth century novels. Hell, the very lack of a centralized, main character makes this book fairly unique among anything I've read written before, oh, 1920 or so.

Bingo

Precocious teen, mysterious woman, secret passageway... okay, no, we're not playing Murakami Bingo. That'd be dumb. But I did find a pretty spot-on card for Victor Hugo Bingo! Local women gossiping, terrible foster parents, Paris, lines in Latin, unrequited love, tangent of at least 50 pages, big battle near the end... yeah, that all fits, and it fits for Les Misérables too. Of course, therein lies the problem - what else did Victor Hugo write beyond this book and that one? You can probably find a lot of similarities between any two stories whether they're by the same author or not and retroactively make a convincing Bingo card. Damn. Consider me less impressed!

Conclusion

Lengthy diatribes aside, this was an entertaining story with memorable characters. There were a few major recurring themes and motifs here - nothing fancy, new or complicated, but poignant all the same. It was also a quicker read than I was expecting, which is likely largely due to the amount of skimming I could do when Hugo zoomed out too far every so often. Can I give this one a blanket recommendation? Eh, sure. It's one of the better books I've read from the 1800s and it holds up well enough today.