Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is a historical novel in the tradition of Scott’s Ivanhoe. It presents a vivid tableau of life in fifteenth-century Paris, a city teeming with noble festivities, grotesque revelries, mob uprisings, and public executions, all of which take place around Notre-Dame. Hugo devotes two chapters to the description of the Gothic church, bringing the reader into the very soul of Notre-Dame. From the dizzying heights of its stony gaze, he offers the reader a subjective view of Paris. The word anankhe (“fate”), etched on one of the walls, reveals the driving force of the gothic plot.
Quasimodo’s fate is sealed when he is abandoned at birth by his mother on the steps of Notre-Dame. Adopted by the Archdeacon Claude Frollo, Quasimodo becomes bellringer of the tower, hiding his grotesque, hunchbacked figure away from prying Parisian eyes. Frollo is consumed by forbidden lust for the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, who dances on the square below the cathedral. He convinces Quasimodo to kidnap her, but his attempts are foiled by the captain of the King’s Archers, Phoebus, who also falls for Esmeralda. Quasimodo is imprisoned for the crime, and is abused and humiliated by his captors. After a particularly brutal flogging, he is tended to by Esmeralda, who gives him water. From this point on, Quasimodo is hopelessly devoted to her. With all three characters under her spell, a dramatic tale of love and deceit ensues. The love-obsessed Frollo spies on Phoebus and Esmeralda, stabbing the former in a jealous rage. Esmeralda is arrested and condemned to death for his murder, and, despite a brave rescue attempt by Quasimodo, is later hanged. Quasimodo, seeing Esmeralda hanging lifeless from the gallows, cries out, “There is all I loved.” The theme of redemption through love struck a universal chord. KL
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1800s
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
Lifespan | b. 1799 (Russia), d. 1837
First Published | 1833
Written and Serially Published | 1823–31
Original Title | Yevgeny Onegin
“The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten-thousand truths.”
Described by Gorki as “the beginning of all beginnings,” and written, in the words of Gogol, by “the most singular manifestation of the Russian spirit,” Pushkin’s novel in verse occupies a crucial place in the Russian literary canon. It is about the jaded sophisticate Eugene Onegin—who spurns the love of the simple provincial girl Tatiana, only relenting when it is too late—who kills his friend in a duel provoked by himself.
The reasons for the novel’s success are disputed. According to Vladimir Nabokov, it lies in its language, “verse melodies the likes of which had never been known before in Russia.” If Nabokov is right, an intuitive appreciation of Eugene Onegin’s seminal significance will be difficult for those who are unable to read the novel in the original; but without it, any understanding of Russian literary culture will miss a vital reference point. Yet even in translation, the way Pushkin achieves a sense of seriousness through irony and playfulness is striking. Narrative convention is subverted, the literary project itself refracted in a series of delightful digressions, inventions, and jokes. Not despite but because of all this richness, the tale acquires a depth of meaning that is hard to account for given the simplicity of its plot of spurned love and sacrificed friendship.
Extremely funny and deeply serious, Pushkin’s lightness of touch combines with an astonishing, funambulist freedom of language within a sophisticated, strictly executed poetic form (the fourteen-verse so-called “Onegin-stanza”). Even if you choose not to take Nabokov’s advice and learn Russian before beginning the novel, it is certainly worth reading the work in more than one translation, preferably with the benefit of Nabokov’s detailed commentary. DG
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1800s
Eugénie Grandet
Honoré de Balzac
Lifespan | b. 1799 (France), d. 1850
First Published | 1834
First Published by | Charles-Béchet (Paris)
Original Language | French
This Jules Leroux illustration, taken from a 1911 edition of the novel, depicts Nanon and a manservant carrying a keg.
“Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficently over others.”
Like Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac wrote novels in part to clear debts and the pains of debt—capital accumulation and attendant moral corruption run right through Eugénie Grandet, which later became part of Balzac’s larger grouping of novels, La Comédie Humaine. Amid robust, moral critique of greed, and the poverty of provincial experience, this novel combines convincingly drawn human characters with a sociological grasp of deeper changes in French society. The realist representation of Eugénie’s father as a tyrannical miser shows the workings of avarice not just as an individual “sin,” but as a reflection of the secular nihilism of financial calculation in nineteenth-century capitalism.
The plot has a classical simplicity and causal circularity, unfolding a bourgeois tragedy that the narrator declares more cruel than any endured by the house of Atreus in Greek tragedy. Eugénie’s father’s fixation on money limits her experience, and ultimately destroys the family. The novel unveils the full damage done to Eugénie, though she asserts some moral dignity through acts of precise generosity. With a grasp of temporal cycles that prefigures Proust, Balzac dramatizes both the critical framework of individual actions and the wheels of generational change. Comic bathos tempers the stark social realism; the entertainment Balzac wrings from the judgments of his more or less omniscient narrator is surprising. An ideal introduction to one of the great realist novelists. DM
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1800s
Le Père Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
Lifespan | b. 1799 (France), d. 1850
First Published | 1834–1835
First Published by | Werdet (Paris)
Original Language | French
This is the story of a wealthy businessman, Goriot, who bequeaths a fortune to his two ungrateful daughters. Living alone in a shabby boarding house, so that he can continue to give what little he has to his avaricious offspring, he also befriends an ambitious young man named Rastignac, who exploits their association to further his own social aspirations. As intrigue, betrayal, and even murder become implicated in the daughters’ rise into high society, various villains ensure that the narrative is enlivened by some sensational plot twists. Essentially, though, it is Goriot’s unreciprocated love for his daughters that is the central tragedy around which Balzac chronicles the broader social malaise.
Constituting one of the works in Balzac’s epic series, La Comédie Humaine, Le Père Goriot essentially transposes Shakespeare’s King Lear to 1820s Paris. Against Goriot’s selfless devotion to his family, the novel explores in myriad ways how it is no longer filial bonds or ideals of community that sustains the social edifice, but a corrupt pseudo-aristocracy that is based on aggressive individualism and greed.
Although some may become impatient with the overly sinuous plot structure, it is Balzac’s eye for detail and his gift for psychological realism that continue to inspire admiration. The sheer breadth of his artistic vision locates him firmly within the nineteenth-century tradition, but his narrative technique and attention to character still make Balzac a hugely important figure in modern fiction. VA
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1800s
The Nose
Nikolay Gogol
Lifespan | b. 1809 (Ukraine), d. 1852
First Published | 1836 (Russia)
Original Title | Nos
Original Language | Russian
One of Gogol’s best-known stories, The Nose is quite possibly also one of the most absurd, and as such is the forerunner of a tradition that almost a century later would become very strong, not only in Russia, but all over Europe. It has also served as the basis
for a wonderfully inventive and funny opera of the same name by Shostakovich.
Kovalev is a junior civil servant with a consciousness of his own importance and an equally acute sense of his place in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Alarmingly, he wakes up one morning to find his nose gone. While on his way to the relevant authorities to signal this loss, he is astonished to meet his nose dressed in the uniform of a civil servant several ranks above him. He attempts to address the errant nose, but is rebuffed on the grounds of rank. He tries to place a notice in the newspaper to ask for help in catching his nose, but fails. When his nose is later brought back to him by the police, the doctor says it cannot be put back on. Some time later, and for no apparent reason, Kovalev wakes up to find his nose mysteriously back in its place. The whole story is related in considerable detail, only to end with a list of all the implausibilities in this literally incredible story. Gogol even goes so far as to make the indignant statement that the greatest of these implausibilities is “how authors can choose such subjects” at all. Readers may well wonder why Gogol did choose to write The Nose, but they are unlikely to regret that he did. DG
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1800s
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Lifespan | b. 1812 (England), d. 1870
First Published | 1838 by R. Bentley (London)
Full Title | The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress
The cover of the 1846 edition: by then Oliver Twist had already taken up an immovable place at the heart of Victorian culture.
George Cruikshank, the illustrator of Oliver Twist, created unforgettable images of Fagin and the Artful Dodger.
Oliver Twist started life as one of Dickens’s “Mudfog” sketches, a series of papers written for the early numbers of Bentley’s Miscellany. The first two monthly parts, depicting Oliver’s birth and upbringing in the workhouse, formed part of a series of radical melodramatic attacks on the 1834 New Poor Law. Oliver Twist is at once a picaresque story, a melodrama, and a fairy-tale romance in which the foundling is revealed to have noble origins. It is also one of the first novels to feature a child as the central character; though, in contrast with Dickens’s later children, Oliver both stays a prepubescent and remains untouched by the traumas he experiences. Oliver’s curious blankness is central to Dickens’s multiple purposes. It enables him to remain the passive victim of institutionalized violence in the workhouse—even the famous scene where he asks for more gruel is not an act of self-assertion, but the result of drawing lots. It allows him to remain free of corruption when he falls in with Fagin’s criminal gang (in contrast with the “Artful Dodger”) so that he can be recast as a middle-class child by his rescuer, Mr. Brownlow. The conspiracy between the wicked master of the den of underage thieves, Fagin, and Oliver’s half-brother, Monks, to turn Oliver into a criminal produces the tension between imprisonment and escape that drives and unites the novel. Oliver escapes from the workhouse and from Fagin’s underworld den, only to be recaptured until he is finally united with his aunt, Rose Maylie, and adopted by Brownlow. The fact that this dismal pattern is eventually broken is entirely due to the intervention of the prostitute Nancy, who brings the two worlds together—but at the price of her violent murder by her lover, Bill Sykes, in one of Dickens’s most bloodthirsty scenes. JBT
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1800s
The Lion of Flanders
Hendrik Conscience
Lifespan | b. 1812 (Belgium), d. 1883
First Published | 1838
First Published by | L. J. de Cort (Antwerp)
Original Title | De leeuw van Vlaanderen
Hendrik Conscience is a key figure in the modern history of the Flemish-speaking population of Flanders, now a part of Belgium. When he began his prolific writing career in the 1830s, Flemish literature did not exist. Conscience forged a sophisticated literary language out of the speech of an underclass in a kingdom ruled by francophone Walloons.
The Lion of Flanders, probably the best of the hundred novels Conscience wrote, is one of the few still read today. A historical romance in the tradition established by Sir Walter Scott, it describes a crucial moment in the history of Flemish resistance to the dominance of the French at the start of the fourteenth century. The merchants and artisans of the Flemish guilds rise in revolt against the king of France and his supporters in Flanders. When the French knights invade Flanders to restore their king’s authority, they are defeated in the battle of Kortrijk (or Courtrai), the climax of Conscience’s tale.
The novel has all the necessary trappings of romantic medievalism, including choleric or chivalric armored knights, sturdy men of the people with bluff manners and wholesome sentiments, and a beautiful demoiselle to be saved from peril. It is not a work of subtlety or startling originality, but the storytelling is robust and the subject matter of interest to anyone with a glimmer of curiosity about European history and nationalism. RegG
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1800s
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
Lifespan | b. 1783 (France), d. 1842
First Published | 1839
First Published by | Ambroise Dupont (Paris)
Original Title | Le Chartreuse de Parme
Movement is the operative principle of this story, which shifts quickly between several countries and decades. Many readers have remarked on the disconcerting rapidity of these transitions, bringing narrative enjoyment to the foreground, but also perplexing us as to the overall shape of the story.
The novel’s sense of movement is achieved not by progression, but by a constantly managed undercutting, which extends to character, theme, and judgement. We are told at the outset that this is the story of the Duchess Sanseverina, but, at least initially, its hero appears to be her idealistic nephew, Fabrice. Yet his principled bravery is not allowed to stand either; arriving at Waterloo his expectation of the camaraderie of war is undermined when his compatriots steal his horse. In the parts of the novel where summaries of a period of years alternate with passages spanning only hours, limpidity of duration is matched by an elevation of perspective—these range from the bell tower of Fabrice’s childhood church, to the Farnese Tower in which he is incarcerated at the heart of the story. With imprisonment as its central theme, Stendhal’s extreme freedom with the narrative seems resonantly undermining. As theme defeats theme, and one aspect of narrative technique shows up the limitations of another, the novel operates according to its own exhilarating logic. DT
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1800s
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
Lifespan | b. 1809 (U.S.), d. 1849
First Published | 1839 by W. Burton (Philadelphia)
First Serialized | Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
Original Language | English
Irish illustrator Harry Clarke produced this suitably disturbing visual interpretation of Poe’s famous horror story in 1923.
“When the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country.”
It seems to be stretching the definition of the word to its very limits to describe The Fall of the House of Usher as a “novel.” However, despite the characteristic brevity of the narrative, the work deserves inclusion here, because it is simply impossible to imagine the modern novel without considering Poe’s masterful writing, and this seminal tale in particular. The story is imbued with an atmosphere of foreboding and terror, underpinned by an equally strong exploration of the human psyche.
Roderick and Madeline Usher are the last of their distinguished line. They are, therefore, the “House of Usher,” as is the strange, dark mansion in which they live. The narrator of Poe’s tale is a childhood friend of Roderick’s, summoned to the decaying country pile by a letter pleading for his help. He arrives to find his friend gravely altered,
and through his eyes, we see strange and terrible events unfold. The reader is placed in the position of the narrator, and as such we identify strongly throughout with the “madman” watching incredulous as around him reality and fantasy merge to become indistinguishable. The unity of tone and the effortlessly engaging prose are mesmerizing, enveloping both subject matter and reader. For one who died so young, Poe left an incredible legacy, and it adds a resonance to this tale that his own house was to fall so soon. DR
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1800s
Camera Obscura
Hildebrand
Lifespan | b. 1814 (Netherlands), d. 1903
First Published | 1839
First Published by | Erven F. Bohn (Haarlem)
Given Name | Nicolaas Beets
A 1950s cover of the book shows the eponymous optical device, used by painters in quest of an exact representational art.
The young Nicolaas Beets was a theology student at the University of Leiden when, under the pseudonym Hildebrand, he published the first version of the loosely linked collection of stories and sketches entitled Camera Obscura. Beets’s prose work was realist in style and mildly satirical in intention. Its gently humorous, ironic portrayal of Dutch bourgeois society was an instant success with a public ready to laugh at its own foibles.
1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die Page 14