Les Misérables is insane. I started reading it in March of last year on my 3DS, via 100 Classic Books Collection, and because this software organises its books into very tiny pages, it is almost eighteen thousand pages long there. Yowch!
I had to admit defeat after one-too-many late nights staring at the still bright screen, and switched to a regular, normal epub situation on my phone, which put the pagecount at a far more reasonable (and more reflective of reality) 1659 pages. Phew!
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| Gavroche, by Emile Antoine Bayard. |
It's a long book - I think the longest single book I've read to date - and so you really begin to live in 19th Century Paris across all of these tasty pages. So much time is spent with Cosette and Jean Valjean and weird little Marius that they start to feel like my own desperate family, and so finishing it was monumentally sad.
The book paints a thick, complex portrait of its setting, and what I really love about Victor Hugo's style, beyond his sort of gothic, dirty despair and biblical intensity, is that his books include interconnected networks of essays slotted between story chapters. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame did this too, but that book was tempered by being short, and so he kept to his musings to just a few topics, like the street layouts of Paris and the strange horror of the advent of the printing press.
"This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. Man is the second."
These interludes which concern themselves with relevant history and the infrastructure of human life allow Hugo's books this very direct commentary. Yes, he's working in all his nasty themes, as an author must, but he's also looking the reader in the eye and saying, "hey... how about that sewer efficiency?"
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| Jean Valjean's emergence from the sewer, by John R. Neill. |
You might think it's going to be boring, and yes, I think sometimes it is - a lot of this stuff is pretty dense and requires a certain amount of context to really stay present with while reading - but the lattice of passionate treatises on all these little topics of humanity and the details of the vast overarching infrastructures which shape the lives of the book's characters provide a unique, strong sense of place.
"Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country."
Much of it is going directly over my head - most prominently the book's moments of pure French (I don't know how other translations read, but Isabel Hapgood left quite a few passages of untranslated French in there - girl, I can't read that!) - but nevertheless, the great tapestry of Victor Hugo's Big Thoughts has become a familiar delight. It's like having your grandpa just go off on a topic for thirty minutes every so often. You're nodding. You're saying, "yes gramps". You don't necessarily totally get it, but you come to love the grampa lectures. That's Victor Hugo. He just needs to do that.
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| Fantine in Love, by Gustave Brion. |
I love, generally, the sense of dark Victorian allegory that Hugo brings to life so beautifully here. The incredible suffering and tragedy of it all. The allusions to an unstoppable, frightening and mysterious God. It's no wonder that Christian iconography has such a solid place in horror. Christianity via Hugo is this beautiful, mystifying, celestial yet shadowy thing. It is the ultimate refutation of all the hideous injustices faced by the poor and oppressed, yet of course, those poor and oppressed must humble themselves before God to such an extent that it is starkly clear to a modern reader how religious values are, at their very core, a driving force for the persecution and punishment of the downtrodden.
"Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment."
Les Misérables is also, at times, a very funny book. The way Marius picks Jean Valjean's handkerchief up from the street and views it as an object of worship because he believes it belongs to Cosette is pretty great. Marius is a bonafide freak in that chapter. He's a repulsive little man completely captured by his own lust. So he stalks them in the least subtle and most crazed way imaginable, causing Jean Valjean to move house to avoid him. What follows is a wonderful despair spiral from Marius that took me from the zone of laughter to the zone of pain.
"Despair, also, has its ecstasy. Marius had reached this point."
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No Marius don't go to the barricade you're so sexy aha... |
This novel is about so many things, but I find its claims concerning the godliness and the searing, blissful intensity of marriage a very interesting one.
"When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars."
It's not the most prominent aspect of the story, but the vigour and passion with which it closes in on this glittering reverance for the young married couple is almost too much to bear. Patriarchal legend Jean Valjean can die in his own sort of pained bliss knowing that he has finally passed Cosette on to Marius and therefore fulfilled his vow to Fantine. He has been redeemed in a most excellent way, but not a complete one. He will always be the prisoner - as life in itself is a prison. He remains in the eternal prison of having once been a convict, as it were. So death then, is a sort of freedom, and in a deeply sorrowful, loving way, Jean Valjean is over, and the revolutionary future is here. Aww.
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| Cosette & Marius, by Emile Antoine Bayard |
"If you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs, everybody is happy."
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| Napoleon Blowing Bubbles, by anonymous (1813). |
Four tricorne hats out of five.
★★★★☆
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