The Spirit of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (i.e. “The Hunchback”) is exactly the kind of book that my reading plan is for. I do read books from the last hundred-thirty years; I just generally like older books better. And the schedule of reading, among other purposes, gets me to make a pact with myself to read a lot of classics I haven’t read before in the hopes of finding new favorites. Notre-Dame is now a favorite. I’ve been walking around laughing while I read it because it’s so good. But, then, I am – you know – a little weird.

If you hear anyone talking about Victor Hugo (admittedly, the chances of this oddity occurring on any given day are quite slim), it will be someone complaining about how long Les Miserables is, especially the chapter on the sewers of Paris. For me that book is not too long at all, and I love the chapter about the sewers! But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone talking about Notre-Dame, the novel. The hunchback seems to have settled into our culture’s consciousness as a character that lives in various films, not on the pages of a book.

The movies, even Disney’s, seem to follow the plot of the novel fairly closely. But there’s so much more than plot here! After all, the book itself is not named for the hunchback, a character with a story that unfolds, but for the church itself, which, with little change from day to day, stands monumentally telling its own stories. Here is a long chapter not about sewers but about the history of the architecture of the church, displaying as it does the Romanesque, medieval, and Renaissance styles in its successive layers. Then there’s a long chapter on what a person alive in 1482 would see from one of the towers of the cathedral. Who needs plot with chapters like these? Next is an amazing chapter about Quasimodo’s activities in the church. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to describe it better than my lame attribution of the adjective “amazing.” But, like poetry that can’t be translated, Victor’s beautiful language is so much a part of the description of the man who lives, breathes, and moves as the spirit of the church, I think the chapter can’t be described; it can only be read. So put it on your ten-year reading plan!

Okay, in a bizarre coincidence, I find that I have heard someone talking about this novel, and I came across the reference again just last night. I was rewatching an episode of Buffy, and in that episode, Willow and Tara, having finished reading the book for class, talk about Quasimodo and Esmerelda while Buffy tries to figure out if Charles Laughton was one of the singing gargoyles. So, yes, the point of the exchange was the joke about the Hunchback movies. But . . . but Willow and Tara with the talking about my new favorite!