Les Misérables

By -

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo


It's the big ambitious 2024 book, Les Misérables!  The book I was most afraid of reading!  And I read it all!  This was enabled by a) my sister and b) a Substack that posted one chapter a day.  It so happens that Les Misérables has 365 chapters, so if you read one chapter a day, you'll get it done in a year.

I was always about as ignorant of Les Misérables as it is possible to be.  I saw a local production of the musical once because some friends were in it.  So pretty much everyone else in the world knows more than I do, and I won't presume to tell you the plot, but just a couple of things I learned.

I'd always assumed that this story is set during the French Revolution, but it isn't.  Jean Valjean is released from prison in 1815, and the story ends in about 1833.  The revolt that is the big climax of the story is one of the students of Paris against the government -- an anti-Orléanist demonstration.  It gets them all killed, except our hero Marius.

Victor Hugo is famous for his long digressions, which were quite interesting on their own merits, but he does have a talent for putting them in at just the moment you don't want them.  Right when you're really involved and everything is very exciting, Hugo decides it's time for a talk about the street urchins of Paris, or the sewers, or the battle of Waterloo.  I'm never much on battles, but I did like the gamins and sewers, those are more my style.  It really was amazing, though, how just as I was really into whatever was going on, Hugo would drop it and talk about something completely different.

I'm still so abysmally ignorant about French history.  It's awful.  I don't really know what these students were unhappy about, the Napoleonic wars are a blank, I'm just embarrassingly ignorant about all of it.  My sister knows a lot, so I ask her.

I'm really happy that I have now read this huge novel.  It was my literary bugaboo, the thing I was most nervous about, and -- thanks to my sister and Project Gutenberg and somebody on Substack -- I can now think of a different book to be afraid of!

The translation I read was a late 19th century one from Frances Hopgood.  It's available on Gutenberg or on the above-mentioned Substack feed.  You can start now!


Comments

  1. LoryJanuary 2, 2024 at 11:52 PM

    I did this too, though with an e-book not an email. That is funny about the timing of the digressions. Did Hugo not think it would make people more likely to skip through them? Or maybe it's less likely, since they are inserted at the places of greatest tension -- one at least skims through them to see if there is anything related to the subject you actually want to know about. I was OK with all of them except Waterloo, that was too much.

    Anyway, I'm so glad you accomplished this and enjoyed it. French history is confusing, but the human elements still stand out even if history remains obscure.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousJanuary 3, 2024 at 6:28 PM

      That's the truth! I'm glad you've done this too. :)

      Delete
  2. Krysta @ Pages UnboundJanuary 4, 2024 at 6:17 PM

    It's so interesting he chose the moments of tension to insert his random digressions. Maybe he thought readers would have to slog through all his thoughts if they wanted to get back to the action? That's one way to try to ensure your readers pay attention!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more