Incite -- (v) 1: give an incentive; 2: provoke or stir up; "incite a riot"; 3: urge on; cause to act |
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Written by: BeckAt long last, I finished reading Les Miserables--the 1458 page unabridged phone book sized version. It took about a year to compete, as I kept getting sick of it and putting it down for something else. I must've completed thirty other books between cracking the first page and closing the last. So, you ask, what did I think of it? Good question. Victor Hugo has never encountered the word "succinct." The word has never come within a league of him. I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the word "succinct" was first coined by someone wishing to define "the opposite of the manner in which Victor Hugo writes." I got over it. Hugo uses Les Miserables not to tell a story--the story seems almost incidental--rather, he uses it as a vehicle for expounding on every single aspect of the human condition--from the heights of blissful happiness to the depths of human misery (despite the title, it's not only about miserable people). It was a letter to the illuminati of Parisian society particularly and the world generally in which he declares his official stance on every important topic he can think of. As such, Les Mis is worth reading simply for its virtue as a primer on the leading edge of Enlightenment era thought in Europe. This virtue is also the book's greatest fault. Hugo's determination to cover every topic imaginable in complete depth and breadth results in such miscarriages of justice as twenty-five pages being devoted to a discussion of whether argot--the language of the Parisian criminal underground--is suitable for inclusion in formal literary composition (his conclusion: yes). There are perhaps a dozen topics at best only tangentially related to the story line in which Hugo devotes twenty pages or more to serious discussion (including, seriously, the entire history of the Paris sewer system). It can be hard going, not because the subject matter is dense, but because it's profoundly uninteresting. Here's the test: if you can get through the famed eighty page opening discussion of the Bishop who helps Jean Val Jean get back on his feet after release from prison (summary of those eighty pages: the Bishop was a really, really, really, really, really good person), then you can make it through the rest of the book. Many of the digressions are fascinating. Hugo's discussion of the Battle of Waterloo as seen from the point of view of a Villa fallen into ruins comes to mind. My biggest complaint is that Hugo's writing is tedious in the extreme. It's insufficient for him to say, "The sun rose like a flower opening its petals in the hands of a young maiden," or, "It rose like a breath of fresh air after a month spent trapped in a wine cellar with nothing but a dyspeptic cocker spaniel for company," or, "The rising sun was like discovering that a diamond which you had thought real but then discovered was fake was actually real in the first place and discovering all this on the day in which your rent came due and you had thought you were going to have to sell your grandmother into slavery to cover the medical costs of getting your left big toe amputated and then after that discovering that your toe didn't really even have to be amputated." No, Hugo must say all three of those things, and then he must say ten more. The man chronically describes single events, scenes, thoughts, emotions, etc., in two to five page long metaphor choked monstrosities. Without removing a single substantive element of the book, a good editor could have foreshortened it with ease by over 400 pages, and therein lies the book's greatest weakness. War & Peace, the mega-novel to which Les Mis often finds itself compared, does not suffer from this same malady. While one might not approve of Tolstoy's hundreds of pages devoted to the fundamentals of historical thought and analysis, they nonetheless could not be foreshortened much without losing the actual substantive content of Tolstoy's argument. The same is not true for Les Miserables, and therein lies its greatest weakness. Without further rambling (looking back on what I've written thus far I fear that reading too much Hugo has infected my own writing style), I'll conclude with this: it's a good book overall, it's worth reading--and not just in the sense that it qualifies as one of the two dozen or so books which people who consider themselves educated should strive to read at some point--and while it has many weaknesses, they are outweighed for the most part by its many strengths. That succinct enough for you? Didn't figure.
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