Victor Hugo Graham Robb
“Graham Robb tells the elaborated story of this colossal life with authority and sympathy. . . . Unquestionably, a magnificent biography.” — Washington Post Book World
Victor Hugo was the most crucial writer of the nineteenth century in France: leader of the Romantic movement; revolutionary playwright; poet; epic novelist; author of the last universally accessible masterworks in the European tradition, amid them Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was also a radical political thinker and eventual exile from France; a gifted painter and architect; a visionary who conversed with Virgil, Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ; in short, a tantalizing personality who eclipsed and maddened his contemporaries. 16 pages of halftones
ReviewIt’s easy to see why Victor Hugo won the 1997 Whitbread Biography Award. Unintimidated by the epic sweep of Victor Hugo’s life (1802-85), British scholar Graham Robb analyzes it with intelligence, wit, and enormous verve. The author wears his learning lightly as he cherry-picks the immense Hugo archives to cogently chronicle his subject’s evolution from leading poetical of the Romantic revolution (Hernani) to ardent novelist of the downtrodden (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to majestic political exile (The Chastisements), thundering versus the tyranny of Louis-Napoleon from the Channel Islands. Victor Hugo is a stimulating, opinionated reassessment of France’s most monumental writer.
From Publishers WeeklyAcclaimed biographer Robb (Balzac, 1994) has invented an intensely dramatic biography of Victor Hugo laced with desolating wit and irony, which brings the outstanding Romantic author down to world from his Olympian heights without reducing him either to a megalomaniac opportunist or to a sheer strength of nature. As a National Assembly deputy, Hugo (1802-1885) led assaults on workers’ barricades in the revolution of 1848, for the duration of which untold numbers of insurgents died. Three years later, as a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist contestant of dictator Louis-Napoleon, he went into exile, firstborn to Brussels and then to England’s Channel Islands, where he finished Les Miserables, which Robb considers “the most lucid, humane, and agreeably diverting moral diagnosis” of modern society’s corrupt institutions. Returning to France in 1870, Hugo largely occupied himself with casual sex for the duration of the Prussian siege of Paris but also turned out inspirational political poems and pleaded for convicted Communards. A conservative who espoused liberal causes, an upholder of bourgeois values with one foot in the avant-garde, Hugo was full of contradictions, and Robb plumbs the messy reality of his life, illuminating galore facets of his personality scarcely known outside France. He gives us Hugo the visionary poetical and painter who kept seances to commune with the spirits of Shakespeare, Jesus and Socrates; Hugo the sex addict and voyeuristic dandy; Hugo the guilt-ridden father of a schizophrenic daughter; Hugo the apostle of an incoherent new world religion; and Hugo the anarchist playwright, forerunner of Brecht and Beckett. Son of a brutish, philandering Napoleonic ordinary and an erratic mother who dragged her brood into Spanish exile, Hugo, by age 16, saw his family fall detached and a whole society demolish itself. From this wreckage, Robb suggests, he devised prescient novels when it comes to the gradual suicides of civilizations, making him a prophet of modernism. In addition to presenting an absorbing account of Hugo’s life and a critical appraisal of Hugo’s work, Robb enriches his entrancing biography with his own unvarnished, unrhymed, highly effective translations of Hugo’s verses. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalThe man who penned the epic Les Miserables (not to mention galore other novels, plays, prose pieces, and poems) and served as an indispensable and revolutionary voice in 19th-century France is perfectly captured in this tremendous and energetic biography. Robb, known for his biographies of Balzac and Mallarme, layers the details of Hugo’s fascinating, and on occasion scandalous, life with discussions of his work and the dynamic political atmosphere of his day to fabricate an exemplary portrait of a man whose vast literary contribution is neared only by the life he lived.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Victor Hugo Graham Robb Pic
Victor Hugo Graham Robb Picture
Victor Hugo Graham Robb Photo
Victor Hugo Graham Robb Picture
Most helpful client reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
 Thoroughly pleasurable AND scholarly: rather an accomplishment!
By Stephen D. Auerbach
Graham Robb is one of that rare breed of scholars, who write what they want to, unfettered by institutional constraints, and write to an intelligent, literate audience that genuinely wants to learn. Much of Victor’s Hugo’s work is inaccessable to the English language audience. Robb’s visual representation and interpretation of a lot of dissimilar distinct elements of his literary career show how much he enjoyed the Hugo’s work, and his a lively interest excessively affected emotionally this reader. He did a masterful occupation of integrating history, the stange personal life of Hugo, and his massive literary output. This will become a classic source of selective information when it comes to Victor Hugo.
19 of 20 humans found the following review helpful.
 Some Background Required
By Michael Gunther
Graham Robb’s magnificent bio of Victor Hugo has won galore awards, and as deserved so; Robb has steeped himself in Hugo’s works and life. It’s all there – Hugo’s greatness, his megalomania, his politics, his poetics, his personal life – stripped of the a great deal of untrue accretions of former biographies. Robb sees Hugo clear, and he sees him whole. My only reservation – and I think it is a somewhat substantial one – is that Robb assumes that his readers are already intimate with Hugo’s vast literary output (not just Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables, but dozens and dozens of other books of poetry, novels, biography, politics, etc.). And Robb likewise assumes that his readers know something when it comes to the tortuous and very elaborated course of 19th century French politics, from the Revolution to the Third Republic. This is a lot of background to assume of the popular reader, and so – by all means get the book, it’s the best existent biography of Victor Hugo, but be prepared to do galore further and added reading if necessary, to fill in the background that Robb takes for granted.
10 of 11 humans found the following review helpful.
Tremendously gratifying — reads like an adventure novel!
By Ann Bingley Gallops
This is the most gratifying biography I’ve ever read, portraying somebody who genuinely was more spectacular than life. It’s as complex, entertaining, and riveting as the man himself. Bravo! Now, how may we get Hugo’s finish works translated into English?
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