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Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera
Jan. 25th, 2005 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
I finally managed to get to the end of Gaston Leroux’s novel “The Phantom of the Opera”. I can’t really compare it to the various movie versions as I’ve only seen the 1925 movie version. According to the introduction (in my Wordsworth Classics paperback edition) Leroux believed he was telling what was essentially a true story. The novel is a little on the clunky side. However, the setting in the bowels of the Paris Opera House is wonderfully gothic and apparently the vast underground world that it describes, even including the lake, really did exist. There’s also lots of stuff about The Mysterious East. All rather amusing as long as you don’t take it seriously. The novel also gives the reader a fairly complete account of the phantom’s life story. There’s a bit too much noble self-sacrificing going on for my liking, but that’s pretty much par for the course considering that the novel was originally published in 1911.
dfordoom)I finally managed to get to the end of Gaston Leroux’s novel “The Phantom of the Opera”. I can’t really compare it to the various movie versions as I’ve only seen the 1925 movie version. According to the introduction (in my Wordsworth Classics paperback edition) Leroux believed he was telling what was essentially a true story. The novel is a little on the clunky side. However, the setting in the bowels of the Paris Opera House is wonderfully gothic and apparently the vast underground world that it describes, even including the lake, really did exist. There’s also lots of stuff about The Mysterious East. All rather amusing as long as you don’t take it seriously. The novel also gives the reader a fairly complete account of the phantom’s life story. There’s a bit too much noble self-sacrificing going on for my liking, but that’s pretty much par for the course considering that the novel was originally published in 1911.
