A wonderful novel that has been popularised especially through the cinema, when starting to read it you already feel at home. You feel safe and comfortable in a narrative that has all the elements to keep you engaged until the end. It has vivacity, it has drama, it has swift changes of events, it has all that is required to keep your mind and breath busy with a wonderful plethora of characters and difficult situations that puts your honest curiosity at test. At my reading style Kindle says 48 hours of reading. Do it, it will be approximately the most pleasant 48 hours in a long time.
The events happened more than two hundred years ago, but the narrative is so fresh, so piercing, it will quickly make you forget this time burden. Only occasionally you’ll be reminded that the events happened a long time ago, you’ll learn lots about different types of carriages and horses, clothing and a society that in its expression was so different from ours, but in its ineffectiveness so close and almost unchanged until today.
The construction of the characters resembles the construction of a cathedral. Hugo spares no effort into going into the depths of a soul, or following it into the heights of their development. It is psychology long before its time, it is morality in its purest forms, it is philosophy through all its pores, it is complex and beautiful, maybe we shouldn’t avoid the word anymore...it is a masterpiece. Novels like this are so rare in the worlds literature, but you quickly feel their Devine touch, it is the density of their description, the beautiful manipulation of scenes and actions which require not only talent, but genius and the dexterity of a great craftsman.
