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It's a long way from Wednesday
Yet I still have some feelings about Les Misérables. Here are a few.
1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.
2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.
3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.
4. I've read this book four times now (well, almost four, because it's neverending) and every time I do I find I've forgotten huge chunks of it. This time I'd forgotten a lot of little things and one big thing. The big thing is that just before drowning himself in the river for the Javertiest reasons imaginable, Javert sits down and writes a list of perfectly sensible Notes For the Good of the Service for his superiors. His suicide note is a list of simple hints for improving the prisons. I had no memory of this whatsoever and it made me love him ten times more than I ever have.
5. I hadn't forgotten how much blah blah womanhood nonsense Hugo crams into every available crevice. It's still a lot, though!
6. I'm almost to the end of the book and both Jean Valjean and Marius are driving me nuts with all this clenched-jaw guilt bullshit. I know Jeans are going to Valjean and it was A Different Time but I am mad at Marius for thinking less of his father-in-law for being an ex-convict, and for not backing Cosette up on making JVJ visit in the parlor like a normal human being instead of this slow-fade deliberate detachment garbage. Show some actual deference to the one person on earth who loves you, Jean Valjean, you dingbat.
7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.
That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.
1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.
2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.
3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.
4. I've read this book four times now (well, almost four, because it's neverending) and every time I do I find I've forgotten huge chunks of it. This time I'd forgotten a lot of little things and one big thing. The big thing is that just before drowning himself in the river for the Javertiest reasons imaginable, Javert sits down and writes a list of perfectly sensible Notes For the Good of the Service for his superiors. His suicide note is a list of simple hints for improving the prisons. I had no memory of this whatsoever and it made me love him ten times more than I ever have.
5. I hadn't forgotten how much blah blah womanhood nonsense Hugo crams into every available crevice. It's still a lot, though!
6. I'm almost to the end of the book and both Jean Valjean and Marius are driving me nuts with all this clenched-jaw guilt bullshit. I know Jeans are going to Valjean and it was A Different Time but I am mad at Marius for thinking less of his father-in-law for being an ex-convict, and for not backing Cosette up on making JVJ visit in the parlor like a normal human being instead of this slow-fade deliberate detachment garbage. Show some actual deference to the one person on earth who loves you, Jean Valjean, you dingbat.
7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.
That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.
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(Anonymous) 2021-06-12 03:27 pm (UTC)(link)Seriously, it's such a spooky and weird scenario to be suddenly confronted with. Did pod aliens replace you with a photophobic clone, Dad? Did guilt parasites eat your brain because they somehow reproduce by convincing their hosts that bread theft is The Most Unforgivable Crime?
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I wrote about this at more length on Facebook in 2015, when I was reading the book. I dug up that old post and put it up on Dreamwidth here .
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It might just not be for you! Hugo is a very specific taste and Les Miserables is A LOT of Hugo. I'm totally sympathetic to the early critics who couldn't get over how "artifical" it was. It's this reckless marriage of moralizing ballad and steamer-trunk-full-of-research-notes that probably shouldn't work at all.