The Hunchback of Notre Dame

By: Victor Hugo

Narrated by: George Guidall

Quasimodo was born disfigured, hunchbacked and lame, and years spent ringing the bells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame have left him deaf, but also spared him the taunts of the cruel mobs of Paris. Now Quasimodo has fallen in love with the lovely Gypsy girl Esmeralda, the only person who ever showed pity on him - but she faces a death sentence, and only Quasimodo's pure spirit can save her. Or can he?

Translated by Catherine Liu.

Public Domain (P)1991 Recorded Books

just amazing

Get past the first 5 or so hours and you wont be able to put it down. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is all that it should be. Tragic love, gothic beauty and horror and the straddling of the knife's edge between dichotomies that Victor Hugo is so well known for.

Ah, Hugo!

Live it to the master to bring the medieval times to one’s reality! What an excruciatingly beautiful and powerful work.
Thank you George Guidall for your warm and compassionate read.

Master

Where does The Hunchback of Notre Dame rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Another greatest book in my opinion

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

One of my books for meaningful life, Victor Hugo was a great asset to mankind.

Amazing

The reader does a wonderful job- accents and pronounciations are superb. The story is fascinating, though I see why Disney wanted to rewrite the tragic ending. A bit of the description of Paris is rambling, without a map to help envision the locational references the author makes. Sound quality could be better, but it's not bad. A must read classic- highly recommended.

Beautiful classic

Full disclosure I am a huge fan of the classics. This book provides a wonderful visual description of France 1500s so beautifully written that you feel as though you are there. The narrator’s voice is silky smooth and almost meditating. Will listen to more than once. Audible 20 review sweepstakes entry

Incredible story! But needs an abridgement...

What made the experience of listening to The Hunchback of Notre Dame the most enjoyable?

The story itself was enjoyable! Scary, in the way that the darkness of the human soul is scarier than any paranormal thing you could dream up.

Any additional comments?

Audible chapters 7-8 are literally 80 minutes of architectural descriptions. Not only do they not effect the story in any noticeable way, they actually detracted from my enjoyment of the book, until I almost stopped reading. The strength of this book is in the characters, the feelings, the action. Skip to it and you'll be happier.

Great Narration!!

George Guidall is one of my favorite narrators! He knows how to read a story! this and Les Miserables imo are his two best performances! definitely worth a credit!

A perfect book

This is the perfect book. Balanced so well between discourse and history, poetry and story. The characters created in this book have depths so unsearchable that a book of this length can't even begin to reveal them.

Love, loss, and the desire for beauty. This book is my favorite book of the year. I'm not a big reader, I like listening to simple easy books. This book is more complicated than my average book, but also much more profound.

The Hunchback, the Tragedy; Not Well Told

Victor Hugo’s stories always have an intriguing story ‘within.’ So goes The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, a novel admirably read by George Guidall. Hugo tells us the story of how happenstance in life can provide one with fortune or fortunate circumstances, and just as readily with destitution or destitute circumstances. There is much destitution in HND, the novel. Most of the misery arises from ignorance by humankind in looking upon the world operating about one. Superstitions, mysticism, and religion engender demonic results. Hugo-created tragedies are always worth the read. But be forewarned, in all Hugo novels, Hugo always includes, in long pedantic diversions away from his story, sub-essays in which he pontificates upon architecture, literature, the nobility, political subdivisions, the economics of the times, and a ton more of detritus having little to do with the story. More importantly, when he enters upon these side essays, he is not as good a storyteller as he is as a novelist.

Okay, so now you know a little about reading a Hugo novel and his writing. HND is still a volume worth the read. That is if you can handle the well-told depravations that come upon the book’s subjects. Especially when read by someone as good as Guidall, and a tragedy as haunting as HND.

Tragic endings in Paris of 1482

The story of the hunchback is not as well known as that of Les Miserables. There are fewer movies and no Broadway play. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is facinating and horrifying and tragic. I felt immersed in Victor Hugo's Paris of 1482, with its gallows at every crossroads and its levels of local justice. I wept at the end and even felt pity for the evil Arch Deacon. The narrator is excellent although the sound quality, converted from type 1 to type 2, is marginal. The recording should be restored/reconverted properly.