Victor Hugo

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.

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A comprehensive and analytical account of Victor Hugo's life - Rated
This is one of the best biographies you could ever hope for, extremely insightful regarding the character of Victor Hugo and providing a superb overview of the upheavals in French society during the 19th century. The genesis of the major works is thoroughly dealt with, and there is a fascinating account of Hugo's affair with the spirit world (as well as his numerous other affairs). There are also some extremely amusing passages concerning Hugo's brushes with other writers and artists of the time. Highly recommended. It deserves six stars and several planets.