Last Day of a Condemned [Hardcover]

Victor Hugo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1977 | ISBN-10: 0865272697 | ISBN-13: 978-0865272699

Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests primarily on his poetic and dramatic output and only secondarily on his novels. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Legende des Siecles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the Englishspeaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1899). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Pantheon. Amongst his other works are: Napoleon the Little (1852), The Man Who Laughs (1869), The History of a Crime (1877), Poems (1888) and The Memoirs of Victor Hugo.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Howard Fertig (June 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865272697
• ISBN-13: 978-0865272699
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,483,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Drags Deep Emotion From Out Of The Reader, August 18, 2005

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last Day of a Condemned (Hardcover)

An affecting and effective novel by France's version of Charles Dickens. This story follows a man from his conviction for an undisclosed murder, thorough his last days in a Paris prison cell, to his final moments before the guillotine. We are never told about the murder the protagonist committed, except he refers to it in a way that hints it was a spontaneous and regretted act of sudden violence against a man who genuinely wronged him, perhaps in a business dealing that left the main character financially wrecked. The man tells us of his childhood and reveals tiny, often tender moments from his life. We like him and wish he was not to die. He is a good man, a sort of everyman, and the feeling I had and I think all who read this might have, is that executing him is an injustice and a tragedy. In reading this I felt every second the man went through during his incarceration and ruin.