A Few More Singularities Concerning Hugo Cabret's Adventures
Tem42 has a fine write-up reviewing this delightful novel, and reading that commentary may have served as my inflection point, where I was persuaded to search it out. I have only a few more enticements deserving mention, which have risen to the surface of my consciousness while moving through Selznick's fast-paced, extensively illustrated novel.
For instance, flipping through the illustrative action section in the Part I climax, I thought, Wow, these illustrations are something of a crude approximation of a movie!
The aspect I most wanted to bring to your attention is that two of the essential adult characters in Selznick's narrative are improvised on an actual couple: Georges Melies and his second wife, Jehanne d'Arcy (actress whom he met around the time he purchased the magic theatre, Robert-Houdin, Paris, ~1888). Melies began as an artist (to his father's displeasure), worked his way into set design/painting & creating illusions, and became an early director of cinematic productions. In fact, he directed more than 500 short films (1896-1913), e.g., A Trip to the Moon, 1902, which becomes a lodestone in the plot of the novel. Melies was an early creator of special effects, which included the rewinding of film to make multiple exposures, making motion-films from still sequences of drawings, i.e., a time-lapse technique, later used in making cartoon sequences, and the dissolving of an image into something else, etc.
One more item of interest, for curious readers wondering which Paris railway station it is where Hugo handles maintenance of the clocks, does not appear until Part II, Chapter 7. There is an old photograph used as an illustration in that chapter. In 1895 the Granville-Paris Express couldn't stop inside the Chemins de Fer de L'Ouest station due to faulty brakes. The engine and carriages careened 30 meters across the polished concourse floor, crashed through a wall, and plunged down onto the Place de Rennes below. Hugo had heard of this accident, and it features in his dreadful dream the night before an important visit. The photo shows the engine head-first into the paving stones after the accident. We don't know this station nowadays, because it was demolished in 1960 and became the site of Tour Montparnasse skyscraper with a new Gare Montparnasse built immediately to the southwest.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is very suitable for a drizzly, or snowy winter weekend. It could also be read to young children to teach them about the taboo against stealing. Be sure to let them leaf through the illustrations, and to encourage some discussion of why Hugo has to grab some food or scrap parts, despite knowing it is wrong to do so.
Sources
In addition to Brian Selznick's novel, I gathered facts from the "Georges Melies" and "Gare Montparnasse" entries in Wikipedia for the third and fourth paragraphs.