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Holy crap, Hugo! Did you not have editors in your day?

I loved Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Hunchback of Notre Dame. The former I read in my twenties when I had a lot more patience for long-winded authors. The latter I read a year ago when I had remarkably less patience yet was still able to cherish the book after those first fifty interminably long pages describing the view from Notre Dame.

Perhaps my patience has further dwindled in the last year, or perhaps The Man Who Laughs simply wasn't as good -- either way, I found this book dreadfully boring and onerous. The passionate soliloquies that ran for pages and the lengthy descriptions of just about everything makes me wonder if Monsieur Hugo was paid per word and not per book.

The story itself is good and if it'd been told in 400 fewer pages, I would have enjoyed it more. Hugo's compassion for the common man shines through. His critique of the aristocracy and royalty are superb. I admire Hugo, even if his garrulousness drove me crazy.

I recommend this book only if you are a mega-fan of Hugo and want to read everything he wrote, you are studying French literature, or you enjoy writers whose sentiments run along the lines of, But why say something once if you can say it twenty different ways!

For the tl;dr crowd, here Victor Hugo tells the story in one splendid sentence: "The first thing that I saw was the law, under the form of a gibbet; the second was riches, your riches, under the form of a woman dead of cold and hunger; the third, the future, under the form of a child left to die; the fourth, goodness, truth, and justice, under the figure of a vagabond, whose sole friend and companion was a wolf."

My enjoyment of this was two stars but I'll bump it up to three because, long-winded or not, Hugo was brilliant.