Review: Les Misérables
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I was in the sixth grade I was placed into the “challenge” class. This was a special program for academically “gifted” children, meant (as its name would suggest) to give us more stimulating schoolwork. If memory serves, most of our classes were given over to logic and math problems. But our major project was to read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
We were, of course, assigned a student version of the novel, though even this abridgement seeme...
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That’s a good point. But I found the digressions in Moby Dick to be somehow more acceptable, since they contribute to the overall symbolism of the plot. In other words, the book becomes a kind of metaphorical microcosm, whereas Hugo’s essays struck me as only marginally related to the story or its main themes.
Roy wrote: "That’s a good point. But I found the digressions in Moby Dick to be somehow more acceptable, since they contribute to the overall symbolism of the plot. In other words, the book becomes a kind of m..."See what I mean though, you want the writing to serve the plot! :) I bet you don't have that expectation of, say, an issue of The New Yorker. There, the writing doesn't serve the plot, because there is no plot. I just wonder if some of Hugo's original audience arrived with an expectation a little more like how we would pick up a magazine than how we would pick up a novel. Perhaps not though - I have no real knowledge of 19th-century French readers!
I have to admit I virtually never read the New Yorker, haha. But I am old fashioned in my expectations that an artwork have a strong sense of unity. Also, in more practical terms, Les Mis is just ungodly long.
Roy wrote: "I have to admit I virtually never read the New Yorker, haha. But I am old fashioned in my expectations that an artwork have a strong sense of unity. Also, in more practical terms, Les Mis is just u..."Insert any magazine of course. It doesn't have to be unreasonably pretentious :) And yea, I feel you on the ungodly long thing. I'm not exactly racing to read the thing myself! But I think the expectations of unity thing is interesting. I do feel the same way. I am just wondering about why and if it really matters.
BJ wrote: "Insert any magazine of course. It doesn't have to be unreasonably pretentious :) And yea, I feel you on the ungodly long thing. I'm not exactly racing to read the thing myself! But I think the expectations of unity thing is interesting. "Haha, I thought maybe you were referring to the post-modern writing style on display in the New Yorker. It's certainly interesting to wonder about how our artistic standards came about. As it happens, I just started reading the Qur'an, which doesn't conform to many of our assumptions about how a book should be. For example, the chapters are arranged in descending order rather than according to any story.
Yea, religious texts are such a great example of a wildly different set of expectations about how a person should or can read! I think the Bible is so interesting that way, because it is not designed to be read in order at all, but rather recited from according to a sometimes fixed and sometimes changing calendar. I imagine the Qur'an is similar, but maybe I shouldn't make such an assumption!
I haven't read this. But your discussion of its digressions makes me think of Moby Dick, and the thought that (some) 19th-century novelists' technique of essential interpolating essays into long narrative works is not properly appreciated by modern readers, trained as we are that writing should serve story, instead of the other way around.