The Misery of Reading Les Miserables
The Misery of Reading Les Miserables
Before the movie, there was the musical. And before the musical, there was the novel by Victor Hugo, a humungous work, one of the mothers of classical literature. It clocks in at 2,783 pages.
I have tremendous admiration for the translator of the version I am drowning in – Isabel F. Hapgood (1887). She must have been smoking two packs a day by the time she finished translating it.
I can’t remember when I started it. Two years ago? It dazzled me. For maybe the first five hundred pages. The chapters about The Battle of Waterloo are a work of art on their own.
But then I began to get bogged down. The damned digressions. Hugo just goes off of a tangent for dozens and dozens of pages – about nuns, slang, all sorts of dizzying things. According to Wikipedia, about 955 pages deal with things that have nothing to do with the story.
And the goddamned Barricades…The June 1832 Rebellion in Paris. The barricade make an appearance around page 1447. And he writes, “The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.” On page 1694. But we are STILL in the barricade until page 1727.
A few months ago, I had dinner with an old friend, who is a fan of musicals. She had recently seen the movie. I told her about my struggles with the novel. I still had about a thousand pages to go. I was wondering if it was worth pushing on to the end.
She asked where I was up to in the story. So I told her – all about the adventures of Jean Valijean, Javert, Cosette and the insufferable Marius etc.
She took a sip of wine, shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, that’s about it.”
My flabber had never been so gasted.
But I went home. I persevered. Everyone, mercifully, is finally dead behind the barricade, except Marius. Jean Valijean saves him. But there is no escape. And I’m thinking, Okay, Vic – how will you get them out of this mess?
Jean looks down at his feet and finds – an iron grating into the sewers.
Oh, Victor, come on!
But at least we are escaping the barricades. The chapter ends there. I turn the page. ONTO A DIGRESSION ABOUT THE PARIS SEWERS THAT SEEMS TO LAST FOR SCORES OF PAGES.
I flung the book aside in disgust and revolt. I haven’t been back to it yet; but I will eventually, just to be able to say that I finished it.
Les Miserables has turned out to be a book that I can’t pick up. Unlike Madame Bovary, which I couldn’t put down. A masterpiece of only three hundred or so pages – and, near the end, one of the longest and unique sex scenes in literature.
