Les Mis?rables
(Victor Hugo)
Les Miserables may be the greatest novel ever written! While its detractors have criticized its incredible length, hopeless romanticism and occasional moral grandstanding, it is a story of love, dedication and humble nobility of the absolute first class.The endless plot revolves around Jean Valjean and poor but noble spirited man jailed for many years before the beginning of the book for stealing a loaf of bread. It follows him as he comes into money and social status after a generous gift from a priest, and then risks it all to save the life of his adopted daughter?s lover. Counterpoint to all of this is Inspector Javier who spends his life looking for the criminal Valjean only to realize later it the same noble man who saved the boy. The scope is almost beyond imagining, roaming from the sewers of Paris to the Battle of Waterloo. Hugo is so willing to wander off into a side note that he at one point stops the narrative to explain that the sewage in the Paris sewer is being wasted and that people in China carry buckets of human waste back to their farms with them as fertilizer when they have visited the city. The novel is filled with the awareness that much of humanity lives in a state of misery, hence ?les Miserables.? Wow all this and a social reformer too! He was actually a member of the French Parliament at one point. The version I read, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee was both difficult and rewarding to read because they left many of the specialized French words Hugo used in, to provide flavor and context to the story. Thus the currency is the ?sous? and the street urchins are ?gamin.? A really wonderful story, if you can read it.
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