The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Children's Classics (Dove Audio))

Rating:
Summary: Book of stone
Review: Victor Hugo sculpts from the stone of Notre Dame characters and story that become molten and pour onto the pages of this grand edifice of a novel. Hugo wrote: "...human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper" In Gothic architecture story was carved in stone, many gospel stories are sculpted in the stone of Notre Dame for example, and with the advent of the printing press Hugo sees the decline of this storying in stone. He places his novel on the cusp between stone and print and even seems to create Quasimodo from one of the stone gargoyles that ornament Notre Dame. In one scene where Quasimodo has created a fire on Notre Dame to melt lead to rain down on attackers below the stone figures seem to come to life: "The restless light of the flame made them move to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing, gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which puffed at the fire, tarasques which sneezed in the smoke. And among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the pile, like a bat in front of a candle." The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a magnificent novel polished by the author into a brilliant gem.