- Hardcover: 500 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 1st Edition 2nd Printing edition (24 Oct 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330337076
- ISBN-13: 978-0330337076
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 4.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 547,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Like Proust, his fellow countryman, Victor Hugo is a writer whose works are discussed more often than they are actually read. Perhaps we had Les Misérables force-fed to us in school, or saw one of the many film versions of his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but of his many other works of prose, poetry and drama, most modern readers are ignorant--as they are of the details of Hugo's life. In Victor Hugo, Graham Robb brings a fresh eye to an old subject with laudable results.
During his lifetime, Hugo himself was the author of most of the legend that has grown up around him, from his pastoral conception on a mountainside to his heroic republican opposition to Napoleon. Robb turns these myths inside out as he searches for the underlying compulsions that led Hugo to obsessively recreate his own history. Robb thoroughly and compassionately presents the tangled, sometimes sordid, often ridiculous events of Hugo's life, at the same time commenting knowledgeably on his work. Victor Hugo is a terrific biography of a fascinating man, a great motivator for readers to start agitating for more translations of Hugo's work. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Product Description
A biography of Victor Hugo, discussing the man and his work. Hugo is the author of "Les Miserables" and the creator of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He came to symbolize the revolution in French literature which overthrew the structures of classicism for the Romanticism of the late-19th century.
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First Sentence
VICTOR-MARIE HUGO, according to his father, was conceived 'almost in mid-air', by which he meant 'one of the highest peaks of the Vosges mountains'. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
VICTOR-MARIE HUGO, according to his father, was conceived 'almost in mid-air', by which he meant 'one of the highest peaks of the Vosges mountains'. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
For all lovers of Victor Hugo this is a must but even those who dont know much about him can be inspired by the words in this book.
Format:Paperback
This big biography was a Whitbread biography award winner in 1997. It is very well written and erudite. It represents an honest attempt to sort out myth from fact and present a balanced picture of Hugo's background, views and actions. e.g. the fact that his mother was not really a royalist heroine as portrayed during the author's reactionary youth; and Hugo's own growing radicalism, albeit still with contradictions under the last King, Louis-Philippe. Hugo's rage at Louis Napoleon's coup of 1851, his exile to Belgium, then Jersey and finally for many years, Guernsey; then his return during the tragedy of the Franco-Prussian war and it's bloody aftermath, the repression of the Paris Commune, are brilliantly documented, including the effect on his literary oeuvre. It is surprising perhaps that Hugo wrote only seven novels, albeit two of the greatest ever penned in Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris; but his output of poetry was phenomenal. What also comes across is the tragedy of his family, the falling out of his parents, the madness of his brother Eugene and the fact that four of his five children predeceased him, just one daughter living into the 20th century, but tragically a victim of the same madness as her uncle.
This was well worth reading, albeit at times a bit too densely literary for me. It gives a superb portrait of the complexity of this frustrating genius of a writer.
This was well worth reading, albeit at times a bit too densely literary for me. It gives a superb portrait of the complexity of this frustrating genius of a writer.
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