Notre Dame de Paris
1831
- man-woman relationships, fiction
- sko nlitteratur
- fiction
- french fiction
- stuttering
- history
- people with disabilities
- french literature
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
- physically handicapped
The story
In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.
What it’s like
Dense, operatic prose in the grand nineteenth-century mode, full of architectural digression: pages on the carvings of the cathedral facade, the stone gargoyles, the crowded medieval streets and their smells of tallow, wine and river mud. The mood moves between gothic gloom and bustling street comedy, with candlelit cells, bell-tower heights and the cathedral's vast shadowed nave as its recurring settings, and a wide pageant of beggars, students and street performers rendered in loving, ironic detail. Its pace is deliberately uneven: long essayistic stretches of history and description give way to sudden, cinematic chases and crowd scenes. Tone is melodramatic, tender and sardonic by turns, and the emotional arc follows a deformed bell-ringer's silent, hopeless devotion and a priest's corroding obsession, both ending in tragedy. Intensity is moderate: a public torture and execution, a hanging, mob violence and a thwarted assault are described with unflinching gravity, but there is no gore for its own sake. Best for readers who love sprawling, ornate storytelling, medieval atmosphere and a slow, rich immersion in old Paris, rather than anyone seeking something gentle or quick.
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