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Title:
The Man Who Laughs
Genre:
Adventure
Action
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Type of Book:
Fiction
Number of Pages:
584
Date Added:
2018-06-26 17:46:51
Synopsis:
The Man Who Laughs is a novel by Victor Hugo, originally published in April 1869 under the French title L’Homme qui rit. Also published under the title By Order of the King.
Hugo wrote The Man Who Laughs, or the Laughing Man, over a period of fifteen months while he was living in the Channel Islands, having been exiled from his native France due to the controversial political content of his previous novels.
The story deals with a romantic time in England, with nobles, common people, and some people who belong in both of those worlds. A core group is the Comprachicos, a gypsy-like and multi-ethnic people who lived as mountebanks, poachers, smuggling, and who practiced mutilation, presumably to create entertainers, clowns, freaks.
The Comprachicos, after having been tolerated for a century, fall into disfavor and are hunted both in England and in France. One group of them is escaping by boat from the isthmus or island port of Portland. They leave a 10-year old child, scantily clad. The child wanders, somehow miraculously in onto the mainland. There he trudges barefoot through snow, looking for shelter and food, and before finding such, finds and picks up a small child who was trying to suckle at the breast of her frozen mother.
Through many an intrigue, through abandonment as a child, growing up “on the road”, through seemingly lost loves, adventures, found-again-love, and more, Gwynplain finally takes his proper place among lords.
He started out at the age of two, being sold, having his ears stretched, his hair permanently colored, his nose flattened and his mouth made into an eternal laughing shape, with a near-frozen blind infant girl, is adopted by a peddler and showman, Ursus, who lives in a wagon with his friend, a wolf.
As the two waifs grow in years, the addition to his crew increases the income of Ursus, due to the angelic look and voice of the blind girl, Dea, and the uproarious “laughter” of the boy Gwynplain. Ursus decides to increase it further by taking his show to London. Some wealth begins to build, but their fortunes soon are threatened by a whirlwind of changes.
ABOUT HUGO:
Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France.
In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet.
Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).
Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo’s views changed 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 Panthéon.
Hugo wrote The Man Who Laughs, or the Laughing Man, over a period of fifteen months while he was living in the Channel Islands, having been exiled from his native France due to the controversial political content of his previous novels.
The story deals with a romantic time in England, with nobles, common people, and some people who belong in both of those worlds. A core group is the Comprachicos, a gypsy-like and multi-ethnic people who lived as mountebanks, poachers, smuggling, and who practiced mutilation, presumably to create entertainers, clowns, freaks.
The Comprachicos, after having been tolerated for a century, fall into disfavor and are hunted both in England and in France. One group of them is escaping by boat from the isthmus or island port of Portland. They leave a 10-year old child, scantily clad. The child wanders, somehow miraculously in onto the mainland. There he trudges barefoot through snow, looking for shelter and food, and before finding such, finds and picks up a small child who was trying to suckle at the breast of her frozen mother.
Through many an intrigue, through abandonment as a child, growing up “on the road”, through seemingly lost loves, adventures, found-again-love, and more, Gwynplain finally takes his proper place among lords.
He started out at the age of two, being sold, having his ears stretched, his hair permanently colored, his nose flattened and his mouth made into an eternal laughing shape, with a near-frozen blind infant girl, is adopted by a peddler and showman, Ursus, who lives in a wagon with his friend, a wolf.
As the two waifs grow in years, the addition to his crew increases the income of Ursus, due to the angelic look and voice of the blind girl, Dea, and the uproarious “laughter” of the boy Gwynplain. Ursus decides to increase it further by taking his show to London. Some wealth begins to build, but their fortunes soon are threatened by a whirlwind of changes.
ABOUT HUGO:
Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France.
In France, Hugo’s literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet.
Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame).
Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo’s views changed 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 Panthéon.
Author:
Victor Hugo
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Publisher:
Paper Tiger (NJ)
Barcode:
9781889439167
Number of Copies:
1
Date Added:
2018-06-26 17:46:51
