Wuthering
Expectations

What happens next?   The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.   Balzac, San...

I have in front of me The Oxford Book of French Verse , first published in 1907, “Chosen by St. John Lucas,” a 500 page collection of French...

But did they know what he had turned to in the meantime?  Victor Hugo – no more, no less.  (Ch. 13, 396) It had been niggling at me, as I re...

From the “Chronology” of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002): 1863, February 23: reads Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – “Powerful”; “I...

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself , “The wrong form, you mean – the a...

And the luminosity said: silence!  Blind man who thinks He reads, fool who thinks he knows!  I tell you: For all eternity does the wondrou...

Victor Hugo, in The End of Satan (1886), is describing the Gospels and their authors (“four simple men”): This story seems added by them to...

Victor Hugo is a giant in French poetry.  Why we do not have, in English, some kind of collected edition of his poems (in many volumes) I do...

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I hav...

I almost forgot to do my Halloween reading, but then I remembered, so tonight’s text is “The Notch on the Ax” by William Makepeace Thackeray...

Emily Dickinson was in the middle of a creative rush that had lasted several years and would last many more.  Or so it looks now – she was h...

As usual, while playing around with The Toilers of the Sea I have paid little mind to the characters and plot and ethical conundrums and th...

Among the fine features of the recent Modern Library paperback of The Toilers of the Sea , the edition I read, are a selection of Victor Hug...

The Toilers of the Sea is an intensely visual novel.  But do I “see” what Hugo wants me too?  He is describing an abandoned hilltop house, ...

The pacing of The Toilers of the Sea is strange.  Perhaps even stranger than Les Misérables , although the scale of the book is more manage...

The Toilers of the Sea (1866) is Victor Hugo’s fifth novel, and his third masterpiece in a row.  I should note that I have not read the fir...

I have to disappear for a few more days – back Thursday.  I had planned to write a book review-like post today, but that’s bad planning, isn...

My suspicion of the concept of the value of the writer’s house museum does not stop me from visiting them whenever I can.  The grounds for s...

Victor Hugo, writing William Shakespeare , fails to follow his own advice, which is only offered in jest.  He is another importunate genius,...

Jean Cocteau’s line was “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”  André Gide had another good one.  Asked to identify the ...