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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
finis (a book review)
Finally, I have defeated the behemoth. Les Misérables has been vanquished and will probably never again stray from my bookshelf. Which is a shame, because the story itself is really good, and Jean Valjean will go down in my personal literary history as one of my top ten characters. He's very well-written while also being almost completely admirable, which is somewhat rare. But Victor Hugo felt it necessary to give the complete history of every aspect of anything mentioned in his story. Something happens to one of the characters during the battle of Waterloo? Forty pages detailing the entire battle, but not in such a way that a person who doesn't already have a good grasp of Who's Who In The Napoleonic Wars can understand it. A character escapes through the Paris sewer system? Let's have a lengthy treatise on the history, advantages, and shortcomings thereof. Yes, OF THE SEWER SYSTEM. (not for reading while eating, that section). And then there were the discussions of all these little barricaded city uprisings in early 19th century Paris which I was supposed to already know about, but which I was basically just hearing about for the first time (thank you public school system), and let's not forget the pages of tribute to the city of Paris itself and all its beauties and uglinesses and street urchins, and all the pages devoted to discussions of royalists and how they felt about republicans and how everyone felt about Buonapartists, and all the allusions to Voltaire and Rousseau... all of which succeeded in making me feel like a complete idiot because I had only the faintest of faint ideas what they were talking about. All this extra stuff seriously dampened my enjoyment of what was otherwise a really, really superb book.
I am reminded of a discussion on an author's weblog about how much the author should tell, and how much s/he should assume her readers will be able to figure out (the author in question had been accused of being overly subtle, since she runs little subtexts through her stories which are so well-hidden that almost nobody finds them). Hugo seemed to miss the boat completely on both sides of this issue. He assumed knowledge on his readers' part about the intricacies of French (and even more specifically, Parisian) government and customs in the early nineteenth century, while simultaneously feeling the need to go into far too much detail about nearly inconsequential side issues. If he'd made five or six books out of this one -- one ripping good yarn and several academic treatises on various subjects in which he was obviously quite interested and well-versed -- he'd have saved at least this reader a lot of frustration. For once there's a book for which a condensed treatment on film would be a blessing. I can't wait to see the movie of this one.
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