Entries tagged with victor hugo

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The Wednesday's Just A Wednesday

What I've Finished Reading

I finally finished Les Miserables! It was too much by a long shot and it was good. Marius should feel bad for the rest of his life. The translation was by Norman Denny, who also translated the biography of Balzac that I loved, and I thought it was pretty good, too. It provides a big boost in readability over some earlier translations, with no corresponding loss of Hugorrendousness.

Next week: maybe a different book?

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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.

( Spoilers ahoy! )

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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Barely Even Wednesday

If I had to pick just one author of ridiculously self-indulgent massive novels to take to a desert island, there's no question that it would be Tolstoy. But Hugo's large-scale asides are about five to ten times more charming on average than Tolstoy's. Since we're all rethinking public memorials, maybe now is a good time for someone to commission a monument to the time Victor Hugo wrote an entire chapter on the allegedly breathtaking sublimity of Cambronne saying "Shit!" to an English general's surrender request, in the midde of his 60-odd-page digression on the Battle of Waterloo.

These days, Jean Valjean is tucked safely away in the Convent of Convenience and we're learning about street urchins. Les Miserables continues to be the best and I continue to be out of commission for the most part.

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Reading Wednesday: An Apology and a Placeholder

I'd like to apologize for the recent streak of non-posting, which is likely to continue off and on. There are some non-book things in real life that are taking up all my spare time. One of them involves cockroaches.

However, I can say that I've started reading Les Miserables for the first time in many years and it's so great. Hugo has just decided that he's going to let this melodrama finish bUT FIRST it's very important that he set the scene with twenty chapters on the battle of Waterloo. Maybe it won't turn out to be literally twenty! But then again, maybe it will.