Victor Hugo's Les Miserables

My mother-in-law and I have a running competition over who has seen the musical Les Miserablesthe most times. She is ahead by 2 or 3 times, so I try to up my score by stating that I’ve read the complete novel 3 times. The judge (my mother-in-law) rules that as inadmissible. 
"There is a castle on a cloud ..."The first time I read it was my freshman year in high school. It was an abridged version, and I thought Jean Valjean’s name was pronounced “Gene Val-Gene.”
After graduating from college – and before I’d seen the musical – I read the complete novel. I was absolutely blown away.
If you haven’t read Victor Hugo’s novel, you need to prepare for a massive undertaking. It is loooong. And it isn’t even long because the plot is that immense. Rather, it is long because he analyzes everything . He goes off on tangents, he philosophizes, he moralizes, he spews and spouts history. He cudgels the reader into submission with the breadth of his immense knowledge.
Imagine being cornered at a party by an enthusiastically energetic and charismatic talker. They talk and talk and talk, and at first you’re engaged, but over time you grow a little bored and you can’t wait for them to end their story. And the speaker keeps going off on tangents, and just when you think they have lost the thread of the story, they come back to it, and you’re trapped until the end … which isn’t really an end, because it segues into another tale. "I have a few things to say."
The first two times, I was willing to endure the gross excess. The third time, I found it tedious. By the time I finished, I told myself, “Never again. I’m done. I don’t need to go through this again. I have nothing to prove.”
Then, a month ago, I saw the musical again, and it sparked my interest in the novel. So, I downloaded a copy to my phone. The book is so immense that my Kindle reader can’t even tell me how many pages are left. Instead, it tells me how many hoursit will take (somewhere around 40).
I got through the opening section with Bishop Myriel (aka Monseigneur Bienvenu), the benevolent bishop who saves Jean Valjean from arrest and rewards him with two candlesticks, with which he has purchased Valjean’s soul for God.
I also go through Jean Valjean’s torment after his near-arrest, where he shreds his yellow ticket of parole and embarks on life under a new name.
And I got to Fantine’s love story with Felix Tholomyes, and … that’s where I gave up.
Footnotes not includedI couldn’t take it anymore. Hugo expounds on the romance of Fantine and Tholomyes (who will abandon her without ever knowing that she is pregnant). It is not a terribly fascinating romance, but rather a philosophical essay on the concept of romance, with loads of historical names pepper throughout.

Perhaps footnotes would be helpful.
But if an edition of Les Miserableswere to include footnotes, the book would be five times longer. The modern reader is going to be unfamiliar with all the names and events Hugo refers to.
What struck me during this attempt at reading Les Miserableswas how significant the novel has been for me. After college, I went through an extensive 19thCentury phase, where I devoured Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Tolstoy, and Melville. All those authors have had a significant impact on me, but Hugo’s expansiveness inspired me the most. For all the lengthy novels that I have read, none compares to Les Miserablesin terms of abundance. It is high drama,tragedy, and comedy, and it shovels historical compost all over you in the hope that wisdom will germinate.
Victor Hugo inspires me to bring everything I’ve got to my writing, so I am often tempted to shoe-horn every conceivable detail into my stories. I would love to overwhelm my readers with the rich details of an imagined world, but the truth is I have grown to appreciate even more the precision in writing. When a single word will do, why belavor a point with five?
I wish I had the patience to endure Les Miserablesagain, but the truth is I’ve carried this load before. I don’t need to pick it up again. And whenever I consider reading an abridged version, I feel like I would be cheating.
For the foreseeable future, I will stick with the musical, whose run time of 3 ½ hours is a bargain compared to my Kindle’s 40+ hours.