Melanie’s Reviews > Les Misérables > Status Update

“Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis.”

God, if only Jean Valjean had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Paris sewers, he would have known exactly where he was! What a loser!

“And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.”
She tried to smile once more and expired.

Whatever Victor Hugo is doing is really growing on me- at first I was saying “we really don’t need two and a half hours about the Battle of Waterloo or this random priest’s life story” but by the time we got to convents I thought 1.5 hours was a reasonable digression length, now I think we really could have spent more time on Marius’ dad’s life story. Thrilled to hear the backstory of every ABC member.

“To prove this, we will confine ourselves to recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact, which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by any thread whatever with the story which we are relating.” 💩 I mean, this entire book (Volume 2, Book 6) is not connected to the story so whatever

Ok, so this book is divided into 5 volumes which are divided into books (48) which are divided into chapters (365). Each volume is the length of a normal book, so I just finished Volume One but I’m 12 hours in. I believe the first book in Volume Two is an in-depth history of the battle of Waterloo. 💩 I’m having a good time.

“The incidents the reader is about to peruse were not all known at M. sur M. But the small portion of them which became known left such a memory in that town that a serious gap would exist in this book if we did not narrate them in their most minute detail.”

Babe, this is a 1300 page book, i am absolutely not worried about there not being enough detail. Also it’s gotten really good.

Ok we just went through every single piece of pop culture in 1817 France. I do appreciate how often the author goes “none of this is relevant and idk what’s going on”

Ok, so book one (of 48…) was an extremely detailed biography of the candlestick priest (look, I only know the musical). Was any of this relevant to the plot? No. We haven’t even started the plot yet, but the author has told us multiple times that none of this is relevant.