Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is creepy, fascinating and utterly terrifying. But like all classics, it’s a bit too wordy, and I found the many pages of the lessons in the history of Parisian architecture a bit hard to take. However, some of the traditional conflicts in the novel, man vs. religion (oh, the powerful beauty of a gypsy girl), man vs. beast (oh, Quasimodo, how misunderstood you are), and man vs. man (oh, the upper class takes a crack at the lower classes), are still powerful.
Sorry for the mini-review, but I’m knee-deep in abridging and will probably not surface until this time next week. But, I’m damn glad I can cross one title off my October reading challenge. Let the bells sing!