SOURCE: "Le misérable," in The New Republic, Vol. 198, No. 7, February 15, 1988, pp. 39-41.

[Brombert is an American educator and critic who specializes in nineteenth-century French literature. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of Ionesco's attack on Victor Hugo in Hugoliad.]

When young Eugène Ionesco wrote his outrageous attack on Victor Hugo, ridiculing among other things Hugo's institutionalized glory as an Académicien, little did he know (he, the rebel who claimed to cherish failure) that he himself would one day be solemnly installed as an "immortal" member of the Académie Française. Such are the ironies of literary fate; and Ionesco's Hugoliad, a "demolition" of the great French poet, and an attack on all literary ambition, is ironic in more sense than one.

Hugoliad: or The Grotesque and Tragic Life of Victor Hugo, first published in a Romanian journal of the 1930s, is...