Les Misérables

At long last, here it is. I've loved Les Misérables (the musical) for a very long time, and had often considered reading Victor Hugo's source material but always wound up balking due to its extreme length of 1460 pages and 365 chapters. That's a year-long book if you're reading a chapter a day! I ended up finally getting the book last Christmas and began reading it in either March or April. I continued the effort intermittently - a few days "grinding" my way through a couple hundred pages or so, then a few weeks off - before finishing it off once and for all earlier tonight. I enjoyed it, but not any more than I expected to. It would have needed to be an incredibly poorly written book or me to dislike it since I already loved the story and the characters so much. And it wasn't! It was 19th century literature, and you all know how much I've struggled with that stuff in the past. But this was actually one of the better-written "older" books I've read. Maybe some of that is due to the translation from French to English. Maybe Hugo's just a good writer. I'll never know, but it's not really that relevant anyway. The big question, I suppose, is whether or not the novel lived up to its own musical. Obviously, there was a lot more going on in the 1460-page book than could fit in the four-hour musical. But plenty of that extra stuff was historical context and filler. I mentioned in my Moby-Dick post that Melville would go off on philosophical tangents throughout the narrative in a way that was very provocative and well-written, but also in a way distracted heavily from the story at hand of Ahab and the whale. Hugo definitely has a similar flair for philosophy and "larger picture" reflection, but his tangents on concepts like love, rebellion, revolution, and society were all much more in tune with the stories of Jean Valjean, Javert, Cosette, and Marius. I didn't necessarily find it interesting when Hugo would spend fifty straight pages recounting a certain battle of the Napoleonic Wars that didn't involve any characters from the rest of Les Misérables, but at least I understood that he was just doing his part to provide a tonal and historical background for revolution in France. (This was written in 1862, after all, well before curious readers could go read about world history on Wikipedia.) Nonetheless, there was plenty of relevant character background and development in the book that was absent in the musical version of the story I've become so familiar with. So I guess ultimately I treated the novel like an extended edition of the musical. If you're unfamiliar with Les Misérables in general, I don't think this novel is the right place to start. The musical is amazing, and now, at long last, there's an official release date (December 2012) attached to a film version of the musical. Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, and Geoffrey Rush? If I wasn't sold already, I'd be sold five times over with that cast on board.