Customer Reviews

The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Hesperus Classics)

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After reading Les Miserables I bought The Last Day of a Condemned Man, I was not expecting an masterpiece like Les Miserables and, because of that, I had such a great surprise, it's a short book but with an energetic message, it shows the horrors of the condemned, the psycological efects in his person when hes own daughter do not recognize him, everiday expecting only death, and with feeling, truth and talent, Victor Hugo show us why the penalty of death is horrendous to anyone.

I originally read the French version of this book, with a preface (which is probably in the English translation, no doubt) that is an essay of the reasons to abolish the death penalty. Abolishing "la peine de mort" was the point of this book, published in 1830, a year before Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris (a.k.a. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame); Hugo was 27. The essay logically spells out why the death penalty should be abolished; the actual narrative of the story - a journal that the main character keeps of his every thought and feeling in the six weeks from his sentencing to the moment before he is taken to the Place de Greve to be guillotined - moves the reader emotionally. What was relevant in France in the 18th cent. is relevant in the U.S. today.

I picked this book up due to the noted reference in Dostoevski's "The Idiot" (He considered it a masterpiece) and I found it to be as good as I had anticipated. This edition comes in a nice contemporary cover (with apparent convicts of recent date), which didn't seem "classic" at first, but upon second thought made the work transcend the era in which it was written and open up thought on contemporary capital punishment. Along with Camus' famous essay, the preface to this is one of the greatest pieces of writing against Capital Punishment. The language is poignant and vivid, the overall tone is intimate, and the structure offers lucid imagery that really confronts, not only the plight of a 'condemned' man, but the finitude to which we all face. Excellent and quick read.

Victor Hugo's "The Last Day of a Condemned Man" may be a short read, but it is by no means an easy one. Not necessarily enjoyable in the usual sense, "The Last Day..." is an important and powerful work in opposition to the death penalty. The book reads like the thoughts and journal of a condemned man in France, who is given six weeks to live. The reader is forced to delve into the thoughts and fears of a man that we never really get to know in a sense; we are told very little about his life, and told practically nothing about the crime he has committed that has led him to prison and to be sentenced to death. But that is Hugo's point -- that capital punishment is so inhumane that it should not matter the crime, or the details, or who a person is, only that the sentence is so cruel and unusual that it should not be an option.

This was an especially interesting read for me as I work in a law office that represents people on death row in their appeals, and some of the ideas in this short novel are interestingly at odds with the work we do. One thing David Dow mentions in the foreword is how death penalty litigation is heavily focused on individual stories and individual cases, trying to show how and why a certain client should not be put to death, but that Victor Hugo's novel approach to death penalty discussion, the idea that it does not matter who the criminal is or what the circumstances are of the specific case, is an important one. It was fascinating to feel how compelled I was and how sympathetic the main character could be even when I knew nothing of his circumstances or what he had done.

This short novel can definitely be tough to get through (it's quite short page-wise but took me a few sittings because I could only take in so much at a time) but I think it's an incredibly important intellectual work to read if one is interested in the death penalty. This should honestly be required reading for anybody involved in the criminal justice system, if not everybody period.

Though not one of Victor Hugo's most ambitious or complex works, this early entry is well worth reading because of its own merit and for many similarities to later, greater pieces. Though a clearly didactic political work in that its obvious intention is to turn readers against capital punishment, it also has high literary quality. For instance, unlike more famous Hugo works, it is written in the first-person, and one must look hard to find a better example, especially considering the difficult setting. The narrative method itself may be somewhat fantastical, but the details are spellbindingly realistic; the book almost seems like a documentary but is far more gripping. Its nature of course guarantees suspense, but Hugo gets the most out of it, writing a story that is nearly impossible to put down after more than a century and a half despite inherent grimness. Like Hugo at his best, The Last runs through an emotional gamut and is also very thought-provoking. It probably will not turn those in favor of capital punishment against the practice but will surely at least make them stop and reflect. Sociopolitical fiction has rarely been done better. Such works usually not only lack artistic merit but are also very short-lived, yet this is still read. There are several reasons - namely of course that capital punishment is still a very real controversy. This has even given the book a minor resurgence, as few works are more relevant, the central moral issues being unchanged. That said, prison and capital punishment have altered much, making this a valuable resource for anyone curious about how they worked in early nineteenth-century Europe. One should certainly read Hugo's more famous works first unless an interest in the death penalty brings this up early, but anyone interested in him should get to it eventually.

Victor Hugo `The last days of a condemned man'; more than a distressing tale, is a social comment at the atrocity of the death penalty. He brings a moralistic debate of the authority of government to take life of its citizen. Through the first narrative of the main character whose name and crime is unknown, he describes the torturous moments the captive undergoes up until his time of death. Through these moments he transforms the death penalty from a means of punishment to a state sponsored torture. In the novel he places a sublime message that it is mans tasks to save lives; and its gods to take life. The death penalty becomes a challenge by man to god's authority.

The book was well written, and enjoyable (though the subject was not one of joy for the most part), yet I almost wish one could have known the main character a little more.

The story is totally written in the first person, of a man condemned to the scafold, never the reader being told about who was the man and which crime did he commit. As the days passes, the end approaches and we begin to feel ourselves in that man's skin, suffering with him, groping for some way out of his whole misery. I suppose this is a book which must have caused a lot of controversy and anguish at the time of its first publication, but I am afraid that the impact is not the same today, with a lot of books and films showing the same theme, only changing the dreaded guillotine for the terrible electric chair. The book is a libel against the death penalty, something Victor Hugo did not manage to achieve in his lifetime.

It is always, I think, enlightening to read lesser-known works of "great" authors, especially highly prolific ones. First of all, it is usually evident why the particular work is lesser-known: Even great authors are capable of mediocre writing. But more importantly, it gives insight into the author's character.

"The Last Days of a Condemned Man" is, by the author's own statement in his preface, a work intended primarily to effect social change. While anyone has the right to write anything they like, I think that this approach is detrimental to the literary value of a work, if literary value has anything to do with truth. I would go so far as to say that this is not a work of literature, but rather a work of social propaganda, and that Hugo helped found the dreary tradition of artist-as-reformer, followed by such disciples as Norman Mailer and Sean Penn.

The affectation of omitting any mention of the narrator's crime is this book's greatest flaw. If (as is obvious) Hugo's intention is for us to truly empathize with the narrator, how can we do so without knowing what he did to be put to death? I happen to be against the death penalty (and I consider myself a liberal in the tradition of Gerry Brown et al.), but this whole book just made me feel like the author was intending to manipulate me, not share truth with me. I wish Hugo was alive so I could ask him for my money back.