Les Misérables

 

Forget the musical. Forget the phrase “Lay Miz.” Forget the filmed musical version with Hugh Jackman. What follows has nothing to do with that. The following is simply my “review” – my thoughts and observations – regarding Victor Hugo’s 1862 magnum opus.

 

Can I just say it is such a pleasure to leave behind this completely dysfunctional culture that drenches us in its filth twenty-four seven from every single electronic device I have at home, at work, in my car, and in general in public. I feel that somewhere in the early twenty-first century, maybe around 2008 or 2010 and definitely by 2015, the culture had passed me by. After a decade of youth as a dyed-in-the-wool hedonist I had my first conversion in the early 90s; in 2009 I had my month-long stay in the hospital which cemented it. So I am no fan of contemporary media.

 

Your body is a result of what you’ve put into it. Mine certainly is. And so is your mind. Mine certainly was. And now, especially over the past year, I’ve made an attempt, to varying degrees of success, to watch what I allow into my mind. I spend a great deal of time reading, probably an hour or more a day, and that’s a direct injection into my mind, my thinking and reasoning, my soul. So I like to be careful with what I read (though I’m not often successful in this endeavor).

 

Les Misérables has nothing in common with 2023 America. In no particular order, there is no diversity, no feminism, no girl bosses, no alphabet people, no multiculturalism, no antipathy towards religious belief, no nihilism, no moral confusion, no topsy-turvy white-is-black and black-is-white. True, there is crime. There is injustice. Indeed, injustice is a major theme of the novel. There is poverty. There is corruption. There is bad faith. But as assuredly as a novel written today would allow that crime and corruption and injustice to triumph in a perverse deconstruction of the human spirit, a work written in 1864 would have good eventually triumph over evil.

 

All right; enough of that. The bottom line is I loved this novel and it is without a doubt the best book I’ve read this year. It’s probably on a short list of the greatest books I’ve ever read; certainly in the top twenty. I enjoyed it immensely, and I am a better man for it, and really for one reason.

 

It truly is a magnum opus, emphasis on the “magnum.” My version of the book clocks in at 1,232 pages. I started it on November 1st figuring that, if I averaged 20 pages a day, I’d finish it by year’s end. Truth is I finished it by December 4. I nearly doubled my page output because I couldn’t put it down.

 

How to sum it up succinctly? Hard to do … Suffice it to say that it takes place in France during a forty-year period of, say, 1792-1832. It’s a turbulent time, similar to ours, I suppose, in the degree if not the substance of the turbulence. We have the tail end of the terror of the French Revolution, the rise and subsequent fall of Napoleon with the nearly two decades of continental war that accompanied it, the Restoration of the Monarchy and the failure of the French economy resulting in yet another upheaval. It’s tough to make a living; if you manage to survive the guillotine, Egypt, the Italian Campaigns, Jena, Austerlitz, the fighting in Spain, Moscow, Waterloo, the Bourbon Restoration, and the July Revolution, you still had to find a way to feed yourself and your family.

 

After a wonderful and lengthy introduction to a saintly man, we are introduced to the protagonist of the story, Jean Valjean, the source of the cliché “gone to prison for stealing a loaf of bread.” Newly released and shunned by the populace, he reverts to his thieving ways yet receives life-changing mercy. This changed man then works through the novel, in varying disguises to stay one step ahead of his nemesis, Inspector Javert, to better the lives of the many he encounters in his travels. Central to this is the orphan Cosette, who Valjean eventually saves, adopts, and raises to adulthood and sees her married. And all this over the scope of the history mentioned above.

 

There is tragedy. What happens to the young woman Fantine, Cosette’s unwed mother, nearly broke my heart (and mine is a heart of stone). There is evil. What the Thenardiers do to Fantine, Cosette, Jean Valjean – and, come to think of it, most of the major characters – will make you ache for vengeance. There is nobility – the idealistic if misguided youth Marius, comes immediately to mind. And there is transcendence, the best thing you can ever find in a written work, in the arc of our main character and several of the others.

 

Hugo tends to digress at extreme length into side subjects not necessarily related to the plot. There are several chapters on the Battle of Waterloo, the idea of the convent, the Parisian sewer systems, the street “urchin” common of the era, and the “argot” spoken by the common and less-common man. Two of these are placed in appendices (which I did not read), but the other three are found within the novel.

 

Les Misérables is the model novel I used for an earlier post on why I enjoy French literature more than Russian. To reiterate, there is no “translator creep” of an editorial nature in this novel. The translation is © 1976; I would not trust a later translation, and certainly none after 2000. The spirit of the novel was very artistic and visual, holistic and free-form. It meanders towards its conclusion like a rowboat drifting down a stream, albeit a stream filled with crocodiles and menacing shadows along its banks. It wound this way and that, seeming to derail but never doing so, inexorably plunging to a natural climax you won’t see coming, almost as if the reader and Hugo discover the ending together. There is no modern spastic rush to induct artificial anxiety in the reader in a mistaken attempt to provoke excitement.

 

So this is an easy A+ for me. I can see a future re-read in five years, something more in-depth, perhaps accompanied by a well-written historical study of the time period or a user-friendly analysis of the novel.

 

A piece of trivia for those French-challenged, as I am. Les Miserables does not necessarily mean “The Miserable,” as I ignorantly assumed. A quick bit of research means it translates better to “The Wretched”, “The Outcasts”, “The Dispossessed.” I like “The Outcasts” the best, artistically and thematically.

 

Oh, and that reason mentioned above is the example Jean Valjean provides to the common man, a common man such as myself.