What I said then:
Not only is it 1,000 pages long, but it promises misery in its very title. Uh-oh.
What I say now:
By far the greatest thing this 'read everything I own' challenge has done for me is forcing me to sit down and give a chance to those classics which I would never have opened otherwise.
I was dreading Les Miserables. And then I read it, and holy hell, it was absolutely wonderful.
It's almost doing Victor Hugo and his masterpiece a disservice to call it a novel. As you finish it (you'll probably be crying), it feels like so much more than that. It's hard to get across the grandeur, the titanic majesty, the all-encompassing, all-consuming nature of this book and how it's written. If every other novel tells a story, then Les Miserables tells a whole world.
The only thing remotely comparable (in my reading, anyway) is Moby Dick, but where Melville brings an intense focus to a very narrow, limited time and place (the final voyage of the Pequod), Hugo is trying to do the same thing with something as large and ungainly as Paris, over the course of about twenty years. His ambition is so enormous that it's absurd; when he pulls it off, all you can be is flabbergasted.
Where can I even begin? Well, there's the huge cast of characters, all of whom feel vital and alive, despite also fitting neatly into one-dimensional archetypes. It's actually incredible how he does this, taking a stock character with one personality trait and making them seem so human, and so real. I couldn't even tell you how he does it, except to say that perhaps, by examining each of his cliches to such a microscopic level, he finds again the human truth that made it a cliche in the first place.
There's his magical turns of phrase. All of a sudden, in the middle of a long paragraph, there'll suddenly be a sentence that sums up an idea with such clarity and succinctness that it feels like an entirely new thought, minted fresh, that nobody's ever had before, yet which is obviously and utterly true.
And there's the way, across hundreds of pages, an uncountable myriad of plot threads slowly draw together, forming a vast tapestry that feels completely satisfactory. Nothing is left unexplained, no character's fate is left untold, yet it all hangs together as one single story. A momentous, epic, grand, beautiful story.
Now, look, there are undeniably things about Les Miserables which will challenge a modern audience. There's the way the same ten or so people keep bumping into each other, one fantastic coincidence following another. There's the way that Hugo, clearly a wannabe philosopher, treats his story like a clothesline, hanging on it all sorts of colourful digressions. (This actually becomes endearing, mainly because he's so good at it: he takes a timeout for fifty pages while he tells the story of the battle of Waterloo; he gives an exhaustive account of the criminal slang of the time; when his hero, Jean Valjean, enters a convent, he gives a history of the building, then a history of the order of nuns that has made it their home, then discusses that orders place within Catholic doctrine, then talks for a while about why he thinks religion is stupid. At the climax of the novel, at one of the moments of highest excitement, he spends twenty pages giving a history of Paris' sewers, and then ten more using them as an extended metaphor for the darkness in humanity's soul.) But if you are willing and able to forgive these eccentricities, you'll be in for one of the reads of your life. I promise.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
books to go: 77
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