What Is This Feeling?
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Notre Dame de Paris Vs. Les MiserablesI just finishd reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame a week or two ago. I really loved it. It took me a while and all, but I finished it. I was very pleased, and it has really made me think about the existance of fate, and how much power our individual choice has on the world. Also, I told myself that I would no longer judge someone on their appearance or exterior visage. Whether it be physically, or regarding someone's occupation. I knew that before, but I was guilty of not always practicing it. So, thank you Victor Hugo!
Anyhow, which of his most celebrated novels, do you think is better or superior over the other?
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lesmisloony
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Hahaha, much as I love Notre Dame de Paris, the answers on this are gonna have a definite bias...
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Orestes Fasting
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Whew, for a second there I thought you were comparing the musicals.  No comparison there.
I think Les Mis�rables to Notre-Dame-de-Paris is... well, not so much apples to oranges as watermelons to oranges. Les Mis is HUGE in scope, with many, many facets and themes and messages to juggle: it's a drama, a blistering many-pronged social critique, a tale of religious redemption with mini-treatises on religion thrown in, a political tract, a study of how events happen and are formed into history; it's Hugo writing about human suffering while trying to keep one eye on the atom and the other eye on the cosmos. It's huge and rambly and somewhat disorganized, but the magnitude of what Hugo is doing makes one more willing to accept that as part of the sheer expansiveness of it all.
Notre-Dame-de-Paris is, by comparison, more tightly-plotted--a descriptor I never thought I'd apply to a book by Hugo, but it's all relative. You still get Hugolian labyrinths of prose, but they fold in on each other more, tracing over similar themes instead of trying to encompass as much as humanly possible. It also has a much more theatrical flair to it--Hugo wrote it back in his playwright days, and it shows in the vividness of many of the scenes, the way they're almost begging to be staged. Its structure conforms much more closely to what we're used to when we settle in for a good story (be it novel, play, movie, whatever), as anyone who's ever tried to explain the plot of Les Mis will probably attest.
So in sum, Notre-Dame-de-Paris is better-executed than Les Mis�rables as a novel that tells a story, but Les Mis has many more aspects than its story alone, and it's a much greater work of literature. Notre-Dame is a wonderful, foundational example of French Romanticism of the decidedly Gothic variety. Les Mis is... everything I listed in the second paragraph, I'm not going to go through it all again, and that makes it completely its own beast.
...that said, Notre-Dame-de-Paris has better digressions.
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LesMisForever
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Well, OF didn't leave much really 
I read Notre-Dame when i was teenager some 20 years ago, and i remember being VERY impressed by it. Esmeralad remains one of my favourite heroines of all time despite reading a zillion books since then.
However, i have to agree with OF's conclusion. Les Miserables is a more profound work.
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Ulkis
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| Quote: | | Whew, for a second there I thought you were comparing the musicals. |
I thought the same. Although it's funny, I think Les Miserables the musical works the same way Notre Dame de Paris works as a book. More concise, works as a musical. As in the way that Les Miserables the novel is better literature, I think Notre-Dame the musical has better music (well, let's put it this way, when the songs are bad, they are really bad, when they are good, they're really good) but qualifies more as a concert/revue than a musical.
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