Books like Victor Hugo

This book won the 1997 Whitbread biography award, so my hopes were high. I knew little about the towering French genius of the Victorian era, the author of Hunchback and Les Miz, and I was curious about the sources of his genius. Well, it's an annoying book. I did learn a good deal about Victor Hugo's sexual proclivities (he was insatiable and omnivorous), the way he mistreated the several long-term women in his life, and his political vacillations (in a time when taking a stand was dangerous in France). Alas, the genius comes across as a thoroughly nasty, self-absorbed, selfish man -- who gave alms to the poor, but made sure everyone knew it. Who switched his political allegiances so many times that no one took him seriously after middle age, except the proletariat who went to their deaths several times because he egged them on to the barricades. And who abandoned his family several times at key moments, leading to (but not directly causing) the death of one of his daughters and the insanity of another. Not to mention his unspeakable, crazy brother. Another semi-victim of the Hugo juggernaut. But that's not why the book is annoying. That's why Victor Hugo turns out to be annoying. No, the book is annoying because it's badly written. It has all the vices of French prose -- playfulness, allusive- and elusiveness -- without any of the virtues -- clarity of thought, structure, or phrase. How it won a prize is a puzzle. I know a good deal more about Victor Hugo than I did before, but I had to wade through 500+ pages of sloppy prose to learn it.