A great literary masterpiece and a fine French history lesson!

books:


	• Miserables, Les Victor Hugo Dutton Adult, 1987 average customer review:based on 39 reviews
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highly recommended

The Great Novel of Compassion

I believe there are many books that will haunt our lives. They stand out amongst the piles of tomes we have read, our memories of them weighted with joy and longing. Sometimes we want to read them again for the first time.

Les Miserables is such a book. It is vast, intimidating in scope but the pages are alive, they breathe with passion, sympathy and philosophy. The characters are alive and remain so long after one finishes reading it. Hugo was a master poet/playwright/novelist. He saw all sides of the political spectrum. He was a Romantic in the greatest sense and he loved women, bedding, some might argue, half the female population of Paris.

In his old age, he was still grandiose, words flowed from him and he stood up for his beliefs, putting them into ink, irritating the ruling class and his fellow literary peers. Les Miserables was his ode to the common man, a love letter to his former selves and to the dignity of humankind. His work is medicinal, setting out to offer cures for the ailments of society.

I read this book when I was sixteen and I still carry it with me, twelve years later. Someday I'll learn French and read the original.

I believe this translation by Normany Denny to be one of the best. It is a bit of an abridgement but only in respect to the modern reader. Hugo had the "superlative" knack, everything was big and meaningful to him. His sentences and paragraphs sprawl out, his focus becomes erratic. Denny lets Hugo span out within reason. He is a translator aware of his duties, his obligations to both the author and the reader. The reading is less of a challenge with Denny reigning in the master.

This is a great read and worth all the effort and devotion. It will haunt you.

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Of course its a classic!

Hugo weaves his tale for the ages in and around his personal, social and political history of 19th-Century France. His accomplishment is stunning to the extent that he keeps the reader interested during the long, seemingly-disconnected framing passages and intently riveted when the connections come together and the reader is enriched and the story enveloped in Hugo's masterwork. For example a 50-page aside on the Battle of Waterloo has no bearing on the story--until the last few pages when a dying soldier on the battlefield forms a connection that provides a strong driving element of the action hundreds of pages later. The passage not only informs the reader of the historical and political context of Waterloo, but frames the intense action following later fully within the context so that it means more at the macro-historical level and is more meaningful at the personal level. It left me crying tears of joy and sorrow at story's end.

The translator, in his introduction, makes much of efforts of many past translations to abridge these long passages, and explains his reasoning for leaving them intact except for two, which amount to only 32 pages of the 1232-page edition. Seems like unnecessary--and harmful--twaddling. For example, I wrote this review before finishing the two appended sections, in which I found this statement by Hugo exactly confirming my review:

"One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events when these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other. All the features traced by providence on the surface of a nation have their sombre but distinct counterpart in the depths, and every stirring in the depths produces a tremor on the surface. True history being a composite of all things, the true historian must concern himself with all things."

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The Hobo Philosopher

The first time that I read this book I was about 18 years old. This is the only book in my life that I have ever read where I can say that "I couldn't put it down". I read this book and I balled like a baby. I remember that I had to go and get a handkerchief and blow my nose while wiping the tears away so that I could continue reading. When I finished the book - and I only read the abridged edition, I said to myself; "If I could ever write a book that could cause the reaction that this book has put onto me, my life will have not been spent in vain. I am still trying to write that book. I have since read the book two or three more times and I'm about to read it again. How a man with just words on a page could create such a reaction is really beyond my wildest estimations.

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A great literary masterpiece and a fine French history lesson!

Les Miserables is justifiably known as a great literary masterpiece. However, I had hitherto neither read the book nor seen the show. I am now so pleased that I have read the book before seeing the show and I am sure that I will enjoy the latter so much more through having enjoyed so greatly the former. This edition, translated by Norman Denny, runs to more than 1,200 pages and Mr Denny makes the point in his introduction that Victor Hugo's original contains 'digressions,' meaning that, to some readers at least, certain sections of the book, maybe some 100 pages or more in total, may appear to 'digress' from the principal 'plot.' But even the 'digressions' are valuable, for they give to the less knowledgeable - such as myself - a fine lesson in French history, as does the 'plot' itself. Victor Hugo takes the reader through some of France's most turbulent times, from before the Revolution of 1789, through the Empire of the first Napoleon, and to and beyond the further Revolution of 1848. If one were wanting to be flippant, it would appear that the French were for ever revolting and for ever at the barricades. I do not wish to be flippant, however, and this great tome charts the progress or otherwise of French affairs through the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries with inimitable flair and profound knowledge, for the author lived through most of it, even suffering temporary exile from France when he crossed the authorities of Napoleon III. It is against the background of such ongoing turbulence (which explains so much of later French history) that the immensely moving and complicated tales of Jean Valjean and Cosette and Marius and all of the other larger-than-life characters are told. To those readers with the willingness to spend more than the average time on a tremendous and unforgettable work, this is for you. Read it and then see the show!

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a 19th century soap opera

Reading Les Miserable takes you back to the 19th century, not just in the content, but as a reader. You can't enjoy the book unless you allow yourself to amble along with Victor Hugo as he digresses from his plot and then digresses from his digressions. It's hard to imagine this book being published today, as marvelous as it truly is.

That's more a reflection on the nature of publishing in 2007, and our impatient reading habits, than Hugo's writing, which is superb. His descriptions of places and characters are all masterful.

Nevertheless, I find that I'm by-passing huge sections where Hugo takes a wide tangent that has nothing to do with the story, even though these are well written - actually, very well written. The section on Waterloo, for instance, is something I plan to return to when I'm reading French history, but it has nothing to do with the travails of Jean Valjean and Cosette, and I've skipped it for now.

When Hugo remembers he is telling a story, the writing is exciting, dramatic, full of unlikely coincidences that you just accept because it's fun. It's a 19th century soap opera for readers who had little else to read and far fewer distractions than a modern reader, and his perceptively drawn characters entertain us even today.

But be prepared to enjoy Les Miserable over an extended period of time, like you do "The Young and the Restless," with a multitude of story lines, often unconnected.

By the way, in contrast to other readers, I'm enjoying Norman Denny's translation, although not having read the other versions, I can't make comparisons.

Having now published two novels --- A Good Conviction, a NYC-based legal thriller which tells the story of a young man wrongly imprisoned in Sing Sing for a murder he did not commit by a Manhattan ADA who may have known he was innocent ... and The Heretic (Library of American Fiction), a historical novel describing the persecution of a family of secret Jews by the Catholic Church on the eve of the Spanish Inquisition --- I have devised a self-education project to help me learn the techniques and styles of other authors, and thus (hopefully) become a better novelist myself.

"Les Miserable" is one of the novels I've read as part of this self-education project.

I'm organizing my thoughts into various categories relevant to writing, such as ... "beginnings" ... "conflict" ... "characters" ... and others, and I'm posting my observations as a blog, which turns out to be a wonderful way for me to organize and retrieve my notes.

This also puts my thinking in the public domain. So if you'd like to see my evolving comments about writing novels, I invite you to take a look at my "Education of a Novelist" blog.

You can reach my blog by searching the web for "weinstein education of a novelist."

LEW WEINSTEIN

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