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Victor Hugo Book

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. Read More

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  • Amazon

    Victor Hugo Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award 1997 Full description

  • Foyles

    Victor Hugo was the most important writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement, Revolutionary playwright, poet, epic novelist, author of the last universally accessible masterpieces in the European tradition, among them Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France, a gifted painter and architect, and a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ – in short, a tantalizing personality who dominated and maddened his contemporaries. Graham Robb has written an extraordinary biography that does full justice to the drama of his subject’s life – a life that Robb calls ‘the most lucid case of madness in literature’. By grasping the giant in his entirety and in his many disguises, Robb, bestselling author of The Discovery of France, rewards us with a panorama of French and European society from the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century. Victor Hugo won the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Royal Society of Literature award.

  • ASDA

    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.

  • Blackwell

    Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award 1997 'One of the best biographies I have read, ever' Selina Hastings 'Mr Robb has written an enthralling book -- one of the great biographies of our time. He contrives not to be dwarfed by his subject...

  • 0330371452
  • 9780330371452
  • Graham Robb
  • 9 October 1998
  • Picador
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 704
  • New edition
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