Reading a masterpiece

[Lizella]

Okay, so I have to admit, I am right now about two thirds through the book only. Maybe I should write this when I have finished, but I still do it now. Ever since reading Les Miserables I have been in awe of Victor Hugo`s genius. So I told myself to read the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I have to say it was rather boring at first until it got more and more packing and emotional. And now I am at a point where I have become addicted. As in Les Miserables I really grew onto the characters. And I do not know how he does it, but Victor Hugo always makes my heart leap out to the villains. I mean, first Javert and now Claude Frollo. I am sure of the first. Let`s finish reading and see about the second. Still, he does portray very realistic and worth pitying "villains". <br><br>Oh and I saw the Disney movie and now that I am reading the book I find myself hating it afterwards. I know it is for children, but almost the entire plot is changed. And what they again did and what I can`t stand with Disney is that all "grey" characters are always ugly and just bad. I mean, who acually likes the Disney Claude Frollo and the end?<br>

[MrBojangles]

I hate Disney as well with a passion. I'am not sure if Disney did it but they Ruined Oliver Twist for me!!!!!!

[2AddersFanged]

I loved Notre Dame de Paris myself; so far, I dislike the film versions of it I've seen. The Disney version is one I won't even watch, though, as the notion of their changing Frollo from a priest to a judge just makes me angry. Disney, no doubt, found it too shocking that a priest would actually fall in love/lust and behave the way Frollo does. I personally don't think it's anyone's right to take literature and change it to suit one's own ends. Disney should keep its paws off literature.

I'm surprised Disney hasn't tried to buy up all the rights to Nabokov's Lolita and make that into an animated feature. I'm sure their butchery department could re-write the story sufficiently to ensure it wouldn't offend any of their public's delicate sensibilities.

Frollo's actually my favorite charater in the book. I find him the most interesting: the repressed passion, the fascination with alchemy, the learning, the headlong descent into darkness and cruelty (pun intended). He's a wonderful character study.

[kathleen]

Indeed Frollo is my fave! The passion, the poetry and all!

[Jozanny]

TO THE OP: SKIP THIS POST IF YOU ARE STILL FINISHING THE NOVEL

I loved Notre Dame de Paris myself... Frollo's actually my favorite character in the book. I find him the most interesting: the repressed passion, the fascination with alchemy, the learning, the headlong descent into darkness and cruelty (pun intended). He's a wonderful character study.

Adders: I find your observation interesting because I am conflicted about whether Hugo handled Frollo's villainy (villainy seems too mild a word for the murder of a young girl) convincingly enough.

I haven't made up my mind--yes, Hugo posits Frollo's preoccupation with Esmeralda from the beginning, and yes, the hysteria of Emeralda's mother seems to mirror Frollo's at the end, but I seem to have a hang up with a scholar, even a 15th century scholar, developing an obsession with killing an adolescent because he can no longer redirect his surging sexual desire.

For me I guess the inconsistency, ironically, is the back story Hugo creates to humanize poor Claude. I have trouble squaring that a dispassionate scientist saves a badly deformed infant--and then years later needs to kill a young woman whose beauty, one can infer, is otherworldly.

[Eugenie]

Jozanny, those are excellent observations. I think, though, that true psychopaths and insane people have sometimes quite opposite feelings about different things and can separate, compartmentalize things so that a part of them could do one thing and another part another.
For me, I think the guilt and the lust and the hatred , because hatred I think ruled the man in the end, hatred of God and of anyone who didn't see things his way, bow to his whims and wishes, was at peril and he focused on the girl.
I felt it hard to breathe at times from the evil feeling.
Victor Hugo was such a strange and compelling person, least to me. He was part black and yet moved about in society happily, he was always in debt and could whip up a story like that and make some more denairi and live his wild and storybook life. He was quite simply a genius who really understood the heart and feelings that are deep.

[El Carmo]

Is anybody here, reading Gabriel Garcia Marques?

[mao]

i read almost all Marquez`s books , but iam fascinated most by Love in the time of colera, it is amasterpiece.

[Pike Bishop]

I don't know how to say this, but The Hunchback of Notre Dame--and pretty much any Hugo work--is no longer considered a literary masterpiece. Hugo's style and structure are considered far inferior to other realists like Stendahl, Balzac, and Flaubert. His greatest value is historical, as it gives a great description of the political climate of his time. So, Disney didn't ruin a masterpiece, it ruined a story of a novel no longer considered a masterpiece in any way. You, of course, are free to like it as much as you like.