Les Miserables

This summer Libby and I saw a local community college version of the Les Miserables musical. It was quite good, and the story is compelling and Chrisitan. Intrigued, we biked over to Barnes and Nobles (a quick five mile jaunt) and picked up an unabridged English translation of the novel one day. We got the new Julie Rose translation because, of the two available unabridged translations, its presentation was the most readable (the other version available was a cramped little paper back with no margins).

Anyway, I finally finished Victor Hugo's mammoth book last weekend. It was not as enjoyable as the musical. The musical highlights the best plot points of the book and therefore that compelling and Christian narrative. The book's narrative is also quite gripping and fun to read, but it's interspersed with long-winded digressions that break up and diminish the narrative's power. Since the digressions are generally French Romantic Enlightenment screeds against anything impeding Mankind's Progress - a thing I doubt exists at all in the first place - they especially dim the Christian element to the plot. Hugo ended his life a deist, anyway.

Still, the novel serves as a reminder of the importance of loving and caring for the poor. This is always valuable (though I'd prefer Dickens). Also, his digression on Waterloo is very interesting and well written. It's good to read books by people with whom you disagree, and I've rarely encountered someone as enamored of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte as Hugo sometimes appears to be. After reading Tolstoy (of whom Hugo reminds me quite strongly - especially, ironically, of War and Peace) this summer and hearing how bad, bad, and hubristic the mighty Napoleon's invasion of Russia was, it was quite a shock.

Anyway, I won't read it again, I don't think, but I am glad that I read it this one time. I can understand the abridgement, too, though I'm glad the one time I read the book I did it unabridged.