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Loading... The Toilers of the Seaby Victor Hugo
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I had mixed feelings about this. The first 140 pages were quite colourful and absorbing, albeit complete with the lengthy digressions and evocative descriptions of buildings, especially old and dilapidated ones, that are typical of Hugo's prose. However, the next 140 pages were very dull and overblown, with endless description of rocks and sea and storms and a wrecked ship, with no characters other than the central one. After a while, I simply had to skim most of this section to get to the more interesting final section. That was worth it, with a bittersweet and tragic ending. So a mixed bag, a book of two halves, not in the same league as Les Miserables or Hunchback, but worth having got through in the end. (  )john257hopper | Dec 7, 2008 |   0.018 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0375761322, Paperback)Historical novel fset just after the Napoleonnic Wars on the Channel Island of Guernsey. According to Wikipedia, "the author uses the setting of a small island community to transmute seemingly mundane events into drama of the highest calibre." According to the Preface: ""Religion, society, nature: these are the three struggles of man. These three conflicts are, at the same time, his three needs: it is necessary for him to believe, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plow and the ship. But these three solutions contain three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all three. Man has to deal with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple ananke1 weighs upon us: the ananke of dogmas, the ananke of laws, the ananke of things. In Notre-Dame de Paris the author has denounced the first; in Les Miserables he has pointed out the second; . .."(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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