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Les Miserables (Paperback)
by Victor Hugo
| Category:
French literature, Classics, Fiction, Romance |
| Market price: ¥ 88.00
MSL price:
¥ 78.00
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Les Miserables is truly epic, one of the best novels ever written, it envelopes life, and death, heaven and earth, love and hate, good and evil, and all else under the sun. |
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Author: Victor Hugo
Publisher: Fawcett
Pub. in: December, 1982
ISBN: 0449300021
Pages: 416
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00791
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0449300022
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- Awards & Credential -
An timeless masterpiece that ever exsits in the history of human novels, for many years since its first publishing, this great epic has been translated into almost all kinds of languages in the world and sold out millions of copies around continuing its everlasting inspiration to human culture. |
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- MSL Picks -
Perhaps the crowning achievement of all French literature, Les Miserables is truly one of the greatest novels of all-time. It is, to be sure, an immense tome - a monolith, epic in scope, larger than life itself. Its Table of Contents lists not chapter, but books. Still, though the novel is only slightly less than 1,500 pages, it is worth every minute that it takes to read it.
Clearly, the book was written in a bygone era: the "Show, don't tell" rule was assuredly not in vogue at the time. Every time a new character is introduced, Hugo gives a mini-biography of them, these sometimes being 20-50 pages long. Ditto for every new scene that is introduced: Hugo spends many pages and many words painting extremely precise, very detailed pictures of the surrounding landscape. Not only do we know where the Bishop lives, we know how many chairs he has in his house, where they are located, and each item of cutlery that goes on his dining table. This is the first such account given in the book; many more follow later. These expository passages are what make the book unique. Several of them, such as the lengthy and famous book on the Battle of Waterloo, have little to do with the basic plot of the book itself, only tying in toward the end. Given the length of these sections, and the sometimes hardly-apparent connection to the rest of the book, they are sometimes laborious to read. With that said, the reader who makes it through them is richly rewarded: it makes the following pages that involve the people and/or locales just described that much more vivid and realistic. While reading through these sections, the reader need not worry: every one of them ties into the story, eventually - and enriches it, at that - no matter how loosely they seem to relate to the plot at the time. Also, Hugo periodically stops to make philosophical and ideological points on the matters being described. This is a technique that we rarely see in fiction, and one that may sound like a cumbersome idea that takes away from the story's realism, Hugo makes great use of it. It enlivens and enriches the subjects he is exploring, serving to set the book up on another level. Indeed, this book can hardly be called mere fiction: it encompasses philosophy, sociology, psychology, ethics, and just about everything thing else ever besides, while also managing to be a great drama, an engaging and emotional story, and a suspenseful masterpiece. Indeed, the heart of the book's greatness lies in the contrast between these long expository passages and the dramatic action, which is some of the most suspenseful ever found in literature. It is obvious that subsequent fiction has mined the treasure chest of Les Miserables to the extent that it is not hyperbolic to say that every writer, and every piece of fiction or drama of any kind, that has come since, owes a debt, often a huge one, to this book and to Hugo.
The other important part of this book is, of course, its characters. Hugo, even more than Charles Dickens, painted vibrant, lifelike, realistic characters that live and breathe, love and hate, and change as their surroundings and situations change - and, indeed, they are full of contradictions and inconsistencies, just like real human beings. Hugo, who draws their portraits at length, draws them so well and so realistically that they almost seem real. It is hard to believe that the drama played out in this did not really happen and that the characters do not really exist; indeed, after the reader is done with the book, he or she has, no doubt, expended an emotional load. With these wonderful and believable characters and the dramatic story, Hugo guides the reader through the entire catalog of human emotions: love, hate, pity, sadness, melancholy, hope -- and everything else besides. Yes, the story is certainly melodramatic, and the reader's credulity is often stretched by its series of coincidences, but the story never fails to be engaging, vibrant, and, above all, absolutely masterful. Hugo tugs at our heartstrings. Tears flowed from my eyes at several different points while I was reading this book, particularly near the end. Few books have hit me with the totality of emotional impact that this masterful work of literature did. Quite simply put, if this book does not move you, you have no soul.
A good knowledge of French history is necessary in order to fully appreciate the book: events from the Revolution of 1789 onward are continually referred to, and the political and social contexts that underlie the dramatic events of the book are essential to understand. It often blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction by vividly describing actual events and then placing the books characters squarely in the middle of them. The book is rich and complex, and the plot twists and twists and becomes endlessly entangled. So many characters are introduced that it is often hard to keep track of them all. To me, it is incredible that a human mind could come up with all of this - the huge cast of characters, the convoluted plot, the tangle of emotions and themes. Hugo, a major political presence in his day, used this book as a canvas for his criticism of the French social order and prison system. A humanitarian in the noblest sense of the word, he was appalled at the plight of those on society's fringe, and he used this book to shining a light on their condition, and, hopefully, to help them out a little. In so doing, he created a true masterpiece that went above and beyond his intentions. It is a huge, sprawling, epic work that encompasses so many themes and emotions that a thousand-word review can never even hope to do it justice. It is a true testament to the power of the human mind.
(Quoting from a reader, USA)
Target readers:
Readers who like great romance or epic, or exploring the lives of the underground world in 19th century France.
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Victor Hugo (1802-1885) Novelist, poet, and dramatist, the most important of French Romantic writers. In his preface to his historical play Cromwell (1827) Hugo wrote that romanticism is the liberalism of literature. Hugo developed his own version of the historical novel, combining concrete, historical details with vivid, melodramatic, even feverish imagination. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables.
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From The Publisher
Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
I'm a high school sophomore amd we had to read this book for school last semester. Honestly I wasn't encouraged by it's seemingly impossible thickness, nor by its slow start. Having never before seen any Les Mis movie or play or the musical (which is ALMOST as awesome as the book) I didn't know anything about the plot or the great characters and the whole experience was new to me. This is the only book I've ever read that has kept me up hours as night just to finish one beautiful part after another. My sister made fun of me that I would always talk to the book but when the believable characters act in ways that so thoroughly move your heart it's hard to resist sighing or commentary. Hugo is truly a master at combining every element of everything human to create characters from all walks of life and intertwine them into a poetically romantic plot that can only be described as beautiful. But don't skip the descriptions just to move from event to event. Hugo, I feel, has the unique ability to convey idea and thoughts and descriptions in a way that touches your heart and makes you think and yet at the same time doesn't bog you down with flowery adjectives. The language in his page-long paragraph descriptions flow so naturally you find yourself nodding and flipping pages and before you know it you're on to the next event in the plot. My friends laughed at me when we recently traveled to Paris and I wanted to buy the two-volume unabridged original Les Miserables- even though I don't know a word of French! It is a tragedy for any person with a poetic mind or a romantic heart to miss this book-truly a human classic.
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Lehmann (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
Here's my story about how I came to love this book.
If you're an average schmuck, with a job (not in academia), a life, and some curiosity, this review is for you.
If you're a literary blueblood, this review isnt for you. If your sworn enemy in life used to be your closest friend until they disagreed with you about whether Beowulf was a real person, be offended by my apathy and go away. If you had to turn off the TV newscasts on 9/11 because they were getting in the way of your arguments of whether sonnets devalue prose, just move on down to the next review.
I'm not a Literature buff. I tolerated English in high school and college because I had to, skipping what I could, skimming what I could get away with, and bluffing where needed. The thought picking up a stack of books and being ditcated a marathon schedule to read them by still makes me bristle with quiet rebellion.
After school I ended up with a job with lots of down time. I decided to make use of this time going back and leisurely reading some of the 'classics' that I probably should have read before. Twain, Tolstoy, Dickens, Stowe and others pulled from the titles of Cliff's Notes (Hey, if Cliff says they're important...) Funny, but classics are much more palatable when they are read on a leisurely timeframe. Some I liked, some I couldn't care less about, but Les Miserables was, literally, a life-changing text.
I fell into Les Mis completely by accident. On day I forgot to pack whatever book I was working on that day and dug around looking for something other than Harlequins and Clancys. I picked up Hugo's Hunchback more by default than choice, liked the book, and in the closing commentary a writer mentioned that Hunchback was merely a prelude to his greatest work, Les Mis.
But starting Les Mis was a trial. French words scattered in the text were stumbling blocks. Hugo's text is a jealous mistress- it demands your full attention while reading. Les Mis is not in the genre of modern novels... grab the reader's attention in the first pages or lose them forever. I got bored reading about a bishop's daily routine. It takes 100 pages for the story to kick in. I stopped reading it twice, only to pick it back up a few months later and start all over.
But, as anyone who was read the novel can tell you, those first chapters are essential to the power of the story that follows.
I pushed my way through, got caught up in the current of the story once it began, and floated out the other side a better human being because of it.
Les Mis is a fantastic, detailed journey through human psychology. With 1400 pages, subplots, a cyclone of characters over decades of history, it can be difficult to distill WHAT the book is about into one word, but here's my try: Redemption.
Les Mis can be trying at times. Hugo is very detailed. He takes the reader though various side trips along the way. More than once he spends 100 pages setting up two pages of storyline. But his detail produces a work that is untouched in its ability to reveal the characters.
We see the difficulty in Valjean weighing wealth and praise from the multitudes against "one voice cursing in the darkness."
We see a character in Fantine pulled from innocence with a slow cruelty found nowhere else in lit: being turned for more misery (in surprising ways)like a pig on a split...with a reader helpless to intervene.
I see the police detective Javert as an embodiment of 'the system,'not necessarily as evil as one reviewer suggsets. Hugo's penchant for overly-through descriptions also allow us to see a human side that makes him much more complex. We see Javert recite all the reasons he is right....and Hugo agrees with Javert... but we see that sometimes there is a larger truth than being 'right.'
Writing this a decade later I still see in my mind one of the most powerful images in the story... a middle-aged man and a small girl, both written off by the society around them, each with little in common with the other, both clinging to each other because the other is all they have in the world.
For those who are used to watching all the loose ends coming together at the end of every hour of television, Les Mis will be a rude shift. It ends in a way that can be described as happy in its own sense though everyone doesnt ride off into the sunset or end with a joke and everyone laughing.
Frankly, I think it is impossible to appreciate the nuance of the musical without reading the unabridged text.
I finished reading Les Mis for the first time over 10 years ago. I still remember reading the last page, closing the book, and spending hours reflecting on the immensity of what I had experienced.
Girlfriend read it on my recommendation with similar effect.
Friend decided to stick it in his reading lists on my suggestion. When he started, he came to me frustrated with the slow start. "Is all this about the Bishop necessary to the story?" I said yes and he kept reading. A decade and hundreds of classic novels later still names Les Mis as his favorite book.
Shortly after reading it the first time, he recommended the book to yet another colleague looking for something to read to pass the time. As he handed it over, he issued a challenge: "Give me 100 pages, and your life will change."
He did, it did, and I now offer my friend's challenge to you!
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Justin Jewell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
pLease ingnore the reviewer who sed to read the abridged version of Victor Hugo's masterpiece Les Miserables. As you com e to appreciate literature and all of its finest writers, you begin to realize that you are selling yourself short if you ever read the abridged version of anything. Abridged books should be banned as well as Cliff Notes. It is not what the author intended for you to read and that is what a true lover of books goes by. Now, with that out of the way, on with this marvelous book. There is no character in literature to compare to the noble and saint-like Jean Valjean. He is my hero and the man doesn't even exist. That is how powerful Hugo's prose is. Through this 1,400 plus page book, the reader is entranced with his story and with all of the other characters that his life touches: The street urchin Gavroche, the crafty Thenardiers, the Bishop who gives Valjean the silver candlesticks he stole, and the greatest tragic hero of literature ever, the amazing Police Inspector Javert. The plot, the story, and the amazing way the reader is given an inside view to not only these characters lives and the Student Rebellion that is the climax of the novel, but to the 100 page detail on the life of the Bishop, the history of the battle of Waterloo, and the Inside View of a nunnery of the strictist order in Paris, all of these make this book like no other that has ever been published. It is up ther with the dictionary, the Bible, the Koran, and Darwin's Origin of the species, as the most important books ever made. Read it and be moved to tears. It is simply the best
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Barry Chow (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-03-09 00:00>
Reading some of the criticisms of this masterpiece gives rise to a certain measure of despair. With so much to honour in this novel, what do these critics focus on? Its length. Its digressions. Its departure from modern writing conventions. It's like disparaging the teachings of Jesus Christ because He was preachy, given to parables and wanting a fashion sense.
Les Miserables is not an easy read. Worthy literature rarely is. Hugo takes pains to paint complete pictures of time and place, sometimes going on for dozens of pages just to set a scene. This is because he wrote before the advent of cinema, a narrative medium that has trained us to think in terms of pictures. As modern readers, we are well versed in such visualization, but Hugo's readers were not. Most had never seen a battlefield; had no idea about the horrors of war. Contrast this to the modern reader who has already seen a hundred depictions of battle before the age of ten. Is it any wonder that Hugo felt the need for exhaustive descriptions of settings that we take for granted?
This is a novel with many stories. But the arc of one life ties them all together. Jean Valjean is the warp that binds otherwise disparate wefts. He is more than the heart of the novel; he is its soul. Hugo indulges in a writer's conceit, showing us a man's passage from barbarism to the attainment of grace: the soul of the story on a journey of the soul. What a marvellous self-referential device. This is but an instance of the intelligence that informs this work.
The many characters that populate this novel all contribute to Valjean's spiritual journey. From the Bishop, he learns virtue; from Fantine, pity; from Cossette, love; from the nuns, humility; from Marius, patience. Even his implacable nemesis Javert has something to offer. In matching wits with him, Valjean learns courage.
Another warning: this book is melodramatic. It was written in a more innocent age, before the advent of cynicism and disdain. It is foolish to judge Les Miserables by current standards, and the fact that it may look naive to our jaded eyes says more about the failings of our times than the failings of the author. But insofar as it is melodrama, it is good melodrama. The author's sincerity is never in doubt. He puts melodrama to noble purpose and doesn't yield to false sentiment.
Consider the following passage from the book. Fantine has died and her child, Cossette, has been forced into slavery as a drudge. On a dark night, in the dead of winter, this little girl is tasked to haul water from a well deep in the woods:
"She struggled with [the bucket] for a dozen paces, but it was too full and too heavy and she was forced to put it down again. After resting for another moment she resumed the struggle and this time got a little further before she again had to stop. Then she went on. She walked bent forward like an old woman, with the weight of the bucket dragging on her thin arms and the metal handle biting into her small chilled hands, pausing frequently to rest; and each time she put the bucket down a little of the water slopped down on to her bare legs. And this was happening to a child of eight in the woods at night, in winter, far from any human gaze. Only God was there to see, and perhaps her mother, alas, for there are things that rouse the dead in their graves."
"Her progress was very slow. Although she shortened her periods of rest and forced herself to go as far as possible after every pause she reckoned that it would take her over an hour to get back in this fashion to Montfermeil, and that Mme Thernardier would beat her when she arrived; and this was a further distress to be added to the terror of solitude and the night. She was nearly at the end of her strength, and still she had not got out of the wood. Coming to an old chestnut tree with which she was well acquainted, she made a last pause, longer than the previous ones, so that she might be properly rested, then bravely started again; but such was her despair that she could not prevent herself from crying aloud - 'Oh, God help me! Please, dear God!'
The passage is clearly manipulative in the way all melodrama is, yet I defy anyone with a working heart to read this and remain unmoved. But this passage does not exist simply to milk our tears. Hugo is condemning the failings of his society with passion and with shame. It is unconscionable that a child of eight should be sentenced to a life of indentured servitude because bourgeois morality first destroys the mother and then throws away the child. Such melodrama is purchased with the dearest currency.
This book is so all encompassing, so finely textured, that we sometimes lose sight of its magnificence. The only phrase that does it justice is "grandeur of spirit". This book, more than any other work of literature, epitomizes the grandeur of the human spirit. When Valjean dies, it is more than the death of a good and gentle man. Les Miserables occupies a place among the most vaunted tragedies because Valjean has penetrated to our innermost being. He represents all that is numinous about the human spirit, and his passing is the passing of greatness.
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