The Last Day of a Condemned Man

by Victor Hugo, Arabella Ward (Translator), David Dow (Introduction)

Overview

In this profoundly moving novel by the author of Les Misérables, a condemned man writes of his mental anguish inside the walls of a prison. With six weeks of life left to him before facing the guillotine — for a crime that is never revealed — he looks back on the events of his life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486120966
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	02/08/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Victor Hugo. New Introduction by David Dow

Date of Birth:

February 26, 1802

Date of Death:

May 22, 1885

Place of Birth:

Besançon, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18

Editorial Reviews

This impassioned early (1829) work, which depicts the "six-week death agony and . . . day-long death rattle" of a condemned prisoner awaiting execution, isn't so much fiction as it is a broadside against the barbarity of the guillotine. (The text is accompanied by a brief satirical playlet in which bureaucrats and aristocrats denounce its author as a troublemaker.) There are moments when the plight of Hugo's nameless protagonist and narrator stirs faint anticipatory echoes of (the later) Les Misérables. But the novella's awkward swings between high emotion and jejune sociological comment and its profusion of accusatory rhetorical questions make it of only minimal literary interest.

Kirkus Reviews

Absolutely the most real and truthful of everything that Hugo wrote.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Hugo . . . provides a convincing reminder of what political argument should really be about” - The Observer

From the Publisher