Karoline’s Reviews > Les Miserables > Status Update

I did it.

Now I have to take it all in. This book was an EXPERIENCE. The kind that hovers over your entire summer and colors all your memories.

SO MUCH DANTE

I'm think . . . I'm going to make it through this book this summer!

Also, if there wasn't already a musical inspired by this book, I would write one. It was made for it.

Volume 3 (of the 5 volumes) has been my favorite so far, probably for the variety and liveliness of the situations.

Also, I think Valjean has metaphorically died about five times and I'm only halfway through the book. It's an interesting effect. He doesn't undergo a dramatic conversion and arrive at smooth sailing, he has to go forward through trial after trial, test after test, even now that he's an old man.

I did not foresee Hugo announcing in 1862 France that its current problem was "a bizarre new outbreak of asceticism." 2.7.3

"The reader may allow us another small digression, unconnected with the substance of this book" . . . .

Bold words for a man writing page 455 of a 1300 page book.

For some reason everybody has picked this summer to make fun of Victor Hugo's long-windednesspretentiousness/addiction to irrelevant tangents . . . and as I'm actually reading Les Mis, that's not what I'm seeing. It's more like the biggest worldbuilding exercise you ever encountered, an enormous tapestry of history, philosophy, psychology, and drama. It's a whole different vision of what a novel is.