I’ve been meaning to read this book for about fifteen years (good Lord, it’s been that long since I was in high school!) and I’ve run into brick walls every time. I knew the outline of the story, or at leat as much as you can get from listening to the Les Miserables soundtrack eighty times or so, and I was expecting to read a story when I got the book.
Naturally, I got the unabridged version. I’ve never seen any point in not reading every word the author intended. I learned then why we have editors now.
So I’m doing the audiobook this time, unabridged and very nicely read, and I’ve been at it for a few days and I’m up to the point where Jean Valjean has just gone to the court and is returning to see Fantine. I’ve been at it for hours and hours and hours! And it’s an interesting history and social commentary and window into early 19th-century French life, and I really am growing more and more interested now that we’ve stopped talking about how much of a saint the Bishop was, but this is definitely a story that takes its damn time.
This is a story that walks to the grocery store. This is a story that makes its own ice cream. This is a story accustomed to waiting six hours for bread. It is not concerned with pacing unless this is pacing at a glacial scale, and I loved Lord of the Rings when I was nine. I ambled through seventeenth century British literature adoring Milton.
But Hugo never fails to say in one word what he can say in one thousand, and though it is effective for the patient reader, I would despair of ingesting the entire volume if it were not for my faithful iPod patiently portioning out half an hour at a time on my daily commute. Is Victor Hugo always like this? I recall a lot of pointless word-clouds in nineteenth century lit. In particular I remember wanting to go back in time to punch Dickens in the hand. I suspect all this florid text was just the style of the time, but how have others found it? The story seems to be picking up; does it hold up through the course of the book?
Tolkien was fairly readable in LOTR through the first half, at least. It was in the last half that it started to grow out of control.
But yes, Hugo appears to always be like that. I once started to read the Hunchback of Notre Dame–which is actually a relatively short story–and ended up throwing it across the room when, after 20 pages of describing a room, the action began (which of course involved more, laborious descriptions of the actors and their actions.) 20 pages to describe a single location is, by any measure, a bit overdone. (Of course, some people love that.)
Herman Melville is possibly worse in that he not only spends 80% of his time in description, his descriptions are unrelated to the events. “Hm…ya know, now seems like a good time to talk about the best way to explain how to tie a reef knot…for twenty pages.”
I generally don’t care for that kind of wordiness, but for me Les Miserables is one of the times it comes together perfectly.
I’ve read the unabridged version several times and love it every time (I’d read it before seeing any stage or movie version and generally haven’t cared for any of them). The first time over four days in high school after waiting until the very last minute to start on the assignment.
If you’re having trouble now, you might find the last third even harder (or not depending on your interest in the more historical event based stuff).
It’s one of my favorite books . . . and I was so skeptical that it could be made into a musical. I read the unabridged version back in high school, but for the two times I’ve read it since, opted for the abridged. I just got tired of wanting to scream, “Get on with the damn story already!”
Well, it’s not about the story. It’s about framing a time and a place, and I’ve always thought the characters and the story were just thrown in there so he could talk about the Battle of Waterloo, and the Paris sewers, and the June Riots, and all the rest.
Which would be great, if anyone besides Victor Hugo actually cared about the Paris sewers.
I read the book in school, and I liked it alright but found it painfully slow at times. Then I saw the musical, which I loved. But now I can’t ever read the book again, because it would seem like a great musical with all the catchy songs replaced by dull descriptions.
I once heard a literary legend that back then you were paid by the word. This was to help explain Alexandre Dumas’ writing, which to me also often seems needlessly wordy.
(I’ve often wanted to ask here if this were true, but decided it is one of those fun folk legends and I would look silly for believing it.)
They weren’t paid by the word, they were paid by installment. The Count of Monte Cristo was first published in a newspaper, the Journal des Débats. And so yes, the more they could stretch things, the longer they could count on a guaranteed paycheck.
An entertaining book which discusses the life of Dumas is The Club Dumas, though be warned that it drops all reference to Dumas about halfway through and embarks on a largely unrelated, second storyline.
I “read” the unabridged version years ago but I’ll admit that by halfway through, whenever Hugo would enter one of his senile ramblings about nightsoil or whatever else, I’d start scanning for a character name to pick the story back up again.
My wife loves that book so much that she learned French specifically so that she could read it in the original language. I, on the other hand, have never bothered to read it in any language. Maybe someday, when I get some of that elusive commodity called “time” again.
Actually, I found that part rather facinating, much more then I thought going in. And I really don’t care about sewers.
Unfortunately, it ruined that part of pretty much every movie version because I can’t help but think that the Paris sewers look way too clean and well lit.
Monte Cristo is my favorite book and I’ll still concede that it do go on a bit, yes indeed. Some of the story arcs are so long they go into Low Earth Orbit.
Oh my God, Les Miserables. Apparently there were only about ten people in Nineteenth Century France, and they kept running into each other in all sorts of wacky ways! And every time they did, it was cause for a digression on Napoleon, nuns, or municipal sanitation.
I’ve been wanting to tour the Battle of Waterloo site for years, ever since reading Hugo’s description. I might do it this year or next year.
Man, I don’t want to think about how long it took me to slog through that mess of a novel. It may be a classic, but the digressions were so long that I completely lost track of the plot.
There are two translations widely available – Signet which has the musical tie-in cover, and Penguin which has some boring ol’ artwork on the cover. The Penguin is vastly superior but much less frequently purchased.
One of my favorite scenes is where Marius meets Lesgle (aka “l’Aigle de Meaux” - the eagle of words) on the street after getting kicked out of his grandfather’s house. p. 567-568
I’ll read a story about a guy who has some totally unbelievable coincidence in his life. Because, after all, that’s why he’s having a book written about him - he’s the guy that had the one-in-a-million thing happen to him.
But like eight or nine times?
We must also never forget the history of that one nunnery that I can’t even remember what order it was. Man, that was a fascinating bit of avoiding narrative for forty pages.
I actually liked those parts more than the narrative. It was like, “Damn it, stop telling me about a whiny college student and tell me more about Breton glassmaking!”
Yes, yes he is. Don’t ask me about Notre Dame de Fucking Paris. An entire chapter to describe the plaza in front of the cathedral. 15 cockpunching pages on the goatfelching *door *alone.
Brother, I’ve *seen *the door. It ain’t all that.
But I suspect most of my dislike for him stems from being forced to read (and analyze, and dissert at length on the subject of “why is Hugo the bestest writer ever ?”) the unabridged Notre Dame at the age of 10. The Zola, Maupassant, Chateaubriand, Dumas et. al. I read on my own much later in my life were awesome reads, even though they were long winded chaps as well.