Saturday, June 17, 2006

Victor Hugo

It is just amazing what an appeal the French giant is able to make even now. Of course many criticisms have been levelled against Hugo to the effect that the writer is sometimes inordinately eloquent and the interludes become books by themselves so that the reader is left at largesses to manoeuver his way back to the link in the story. But, for myself, I found these interludes very interesting. And moreover as a man of India, southern Tamilnad, in Srirangam I had already been exposed to the epical styles in Ramayana and Mahabharatha and as a result Hugo found his peers in my reception of reading. More so, I think he was writing about the universal men in his characters, which justified perhaps the wide strokes he tended to make quite often. But how can he remain so gripping in his story telling, all the while so abstract in his philosophical observations. A good story telling means being attentive to the particulars and to match this with intense abstractions running to pages and more than that, altering between these two quite often. No wonder I call him a giant.

After I joined my job, the first thing I did was to buy a copy of Penguin Les Miserables and take that to Neyveli where my father was staying at that time and to read out to him pages after pages of cherished text-places. A transport of interests between father and son! Especially I remember the first scene where the priest goes into the woods to meet the renegade, dying of old age but still a terror in the quarters. One thing I found in Victor Hugo was in his novels the arguments and dialogues do act and do act right before your very eyes. I have found this talent in rare instances, may be a couple of them, right now the one other novelist coming to mind is Ayn Rand.
Another feature of Hugovian novels is the choice and the volitional thrust of decisions, which the characters make. The articulations of the deciding process are phenomenal.