Book review: Les Misérables

[gfish]

Not sure why I choose to listen to this, so soon after disliking Hunchback so much. But I'm glad I did -- it's really good! I cried a lot!

It's still definitely Hugo, who will cut away from the action of Valjean dragging an unconscious Marius away from the slaughter of the barricade to go into a 90 minute tangent about the history of the Parisian sewer system. But the tangents annoyed me less this time, probably because I actually cared about the characters.

I actually really liked getting the lengthy backstory on literally ever character. Les Mis was the first musical I ever saw, and it has been a lifelong favorite. (Bold choice, I know.) Learning about the bishop and Fantine and all the hidden connections between Gavroche and Marius and the Thénardiers was really cool. It opened whole new vistas onto a plot that I know so well. I really liked the book Gavroche a lot better than the play Gavroche. Gavroche on stage really doesn't much going for him beyond "geewhiz, aren't I cute and plucky?", but Gavroche on the page is a very interesting and fully fleshed out character, almost fey in how he bridges youth and adulthood. Marius is a bit more of a twerp, but we saw so much more of him, and so much more of the courtship between him and Cosette, that I didn't mind. Real people are twerpish. Cosette was still an abstract portrait of a silhouette of an empty ideal, sadly. Javert was about the only character who wasn't improved by the extra material. He's so much more thuggish in the book, just a mindless brute. He is devoted to the law not because of any deeply held philosophical beliefs, but just because he is constitutionally incapable of doing anything else. It made him a lot less compelling, for me.

So, yeah. If you're going to read Hugo, I strongly recommend Les Mis over Hunchback.

Comments

[eeyorerin]

Hugo has some really nice poetry, too, and it's short. (It is a little better in the original French just in terms of meter and rhyme scheme, but there are some nice translations.)

[tylik]

I read Les Mis when I was thirteen because a professor told me to. (It's a little more complicated, but I'll spare you the EEP politics and mentorship and educational abuse. I mean, i liked him?)

...I am kind of blown away by the "Saw Les Mis and then read it," timeline. Whoa.

[tylik]

(Clearly this is an obvious thing that many people will do. Just my damage.)

[gfish]

Naw, that's fair. We read a bit in French class at the time, but I only remembered that there was another convict called "I deny god", and the bit about Valjean jumping off the boat to escape.