The Hunchback of Notre-Dame begins in the Palace of Justice of Paris, before a play. The crowds are growing impatient, most of whom had waited four hours just to have a standing spot to watch the play, the celebrities and watching each other. From the very beginning, Hunchback is a struggle of power. The crowd in the end dictates when the play should begin, the hosier turned the balance of power upside-down mocking the cardinal, theatre itself loses to the contest of who’s the ugliest won of course, by Quasimodo. The book started strong, when the playwright of the play escaped the failure of the play to begin life anew in the streets, taking us around the streets of 15th century Paris.
But I have such mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it is a beautifully written and expansive prose that just flows. It is a young Victor Hugo a good three decades before he wrote Les Mis, and while he might be rough around the edges, he writes beautifully. The story is common lore now, especially after it’s been remade as a Disney cartoon, that I find it difficult to shake the image of the Disney version of Quasimodo out of my head to replace him with a non cartoon version in my imagination. The book is full of conflicted, engaging characters who have their good and bad sides, but for the main ones, a lot of depth.
On the other hand, the book tests your patience with some of the actions taken by these very characters, especially towards the end of the book that just left me feeling sick. (view spoiler)
Never do I feel more hot and cold when Hugo wrote about the cathedral itself and in a more verbose chapter which follows about Paris. My knowledge of Paris is limited to the time I spent passing through as an exchange student based in Lille, some 200km up north, but I have my points of reference from the middle of Paris where Notre-Dame is, right in the middle of Paris. Hugo’s writing about the cathedral and Paris is astounding, but it stretched for too long to the point that the entire chapter felt like a list of monasteries, churches and steeples. The details of these historical buildings are minute, and most of the building mentioned here no longer stand and failed the test of time, yet preserved intact in the book.
This reminded me of the epic writing about Waterloo in Les Mis, all in the name to deliver a single plot point at the end, which ended up being vaguely relevant to the rest of the story anyway. But the writing of the cathedral had a purpose. The cathedral itself, Paris itself acted out as characters in the book. But I loved his idea that architecture is text — that the printed text will replace architecture as preservers of culture, which I suppose is partly right. That edifices can behave like men with their stories and adapt to history, as men do.
After a few days of thinking about the book, and wanting to love it as books like these come with heavy expectations, I am still a little lost. There is so much beauty in this book, and so much ugliness to disgust. I mentioned the actions the characters took towards the end of the book that made me wanted to bite the book in half, but throughout the book there are shades where I just began to dislike each and every single one of these characters, even the hunchback himself. I began to loathe these characters, especially Claude Frollo who hides beneath the frock of religion for the knowledge to turn lead into gold, and has a toxic nature with his love of Esmeralda.
I can’t deny that the book is a classic, as it deserves to be. It is still in many ways, a joy to read. It can be hilarious, profound and melancholic all in the same paragraph. I find that Hugo’s writing is still novel, as he dares to meanders away from the main line of the story to tell an anecdote or a joke in between. Hence, the long and beautiful sentences. But some of the plot points are just plain absurd that you just need to laugh and enjoy what enfolds — like the trial of the Quasimodo by the deaf judge, or Quasimodo’s single-handed battle with the Truands.
For me, it does hold something extra, as it takes me back to the Seine. I still remember looking at the imposing figure of Notre Dame when I was 21, an exchange student looking for books in Shakespeare and Co., overlooking the river and the square in front of the cathedral. This also reminds me of having a handful of arguments with the gypsies of Paris, with my broken French then I often resorted to abusing them in my native Australian, which is what I’d do it again if I revisit another time. Hugo’s Paris left me with nostalgia to my own version of Paris, cold in the summer and still full of modern day Truands.
