Les Miserables (Penguin Classics)

Thank God I got the Kindle version for my Kindle Keyboard 3G. I read through 12% of the book before wondering 'how long will it take me to finish!!?". So I measured my reading speed pages-per-minute and estimated the total reading time for the entire book to be 64 hours. Seriously. So I took a different approach: I would read for an hour or two, then when fatigue started setting in, I pressed the "shift-sym" keyboard shortcut to activate text-to-speech, and just sat back or laid in bed while the kindle AI voice read it to me. This book famously takes place in France, and a lot of the names of people / places / streets are in French, so it's nice having the AI effortlessly pronounce them. My favorite was hearing it pronounce "Champs-Élysées" over and over again. It was pleasant, almost hypnotizing. Text-to-Speech allowed me to focus on the incredible story and not hassle through the pronunciations. Victor Hugo goes off on many tangents, such as 30+ page histories of the battle of waterloo, and the construction of the sewer system in Paris. It's quite fascinating and adds much to the story. There are many nuanced scenes that I continually go back to in my head, like the back passages behind the court room for transporting lawyers, and the one for transporting the criminals. And the ideas of whether a person can ever redeem themselves in society, contrasted with the situation that society is often times a poor judge of how to redeem oneself, and whether they should be deserving of redemption. It is an honest critique of criminal justice that is probably as relevant today as it was then. My understanding is that this "penguin classics" version has a better translation than the "free" version going around on the internet. It you're going to devote ~64 hours to an experience of life and death in old France, best put in a few bucks to get the best translation possible. For today's generation, the length of the story can be a bit jarring and leaves you wondering "will this story ever end?" I say this book is not at all to be treated as a story. It's not a television show. It's not a movie. It's not a musical. Les Miserables is an EXPERIENCE. So get the good version on Kindle, and have the AI voice continue the reading when fatigue starts to set in.

How can you leave anything less than 5 stars on the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables? unless... unless! you own a paperback copy of the Penguin Classic and wanted to used said copy as a working copy that you could underline, mark up, and make notes in the margin and then have this "illustrated" hard backed copy with hopefully slightly better paper than the paperback's newspaper-like quality to have on the shelve to revisit. The illustrations? Well, there is a silhouette of a bird on the title page and there is the cover art - and that's it for that. The paper quality is no better than the paperback version. I'm not sending it back because it was a good deal and finding the Norman Denny translation is difficult (I'm still searching for an e-book version.) So, thank goodness for the quality of the author. I have a feeling that like Cervantes Don Quixote, I will be perpetually re-reading this incredible work.

I'm glad to see so many young people drawn to the book via the musical or the movie versions. If there were one writer I would want to know on a personal basis via his work it would have been Victor Hugo. He must have had an enormously generous heart and spirit as evidenced by his writing. This is probably the most sympathetic, almost God-like perspective of humanity that I have ever come across in literature. And what a sweeping cyclorama Hugo portrays. From the fields of Waterloo to the sewers of Paris, Hugo's eye of god sees everything. The Waterloo passages are often discarded in the abridgements, but to me they play an important part in allowing the reader to pull back and look at things from this god-like point-of-view. The great panoramic macrocosm of history is seen in conjunction with the vivid details of Jean Valjean's microcosmic struggle. Of course the characters, which I thought were rather cleverly encapsulated in the musical, are here given their true range and scope. That Hugo loved these characters is abundantly clear. This love is absorbed by the reader. Every time Jabert comes close to capturing Jean, it is as if we were in Jean's shoes. Hugo far outshines Dickens in his depiction of lower class existence in a 19th century European city. His Paris is inhabited by much more convincing urchins. All his characters in fact, are much more believable. Dickens is much more overtly sentimental. Hugo lets the story affect the reader. There is no sense of straining to convey an effect. With Dickens, I am always aware of the puppetmaster straining to get a point across. He is a polemical writer compared to Hugo. He relies on heavy-handed bathos. Hugo remains much more in the background and we are left essentially unaware of his machinations. That's why, for me, I respond more viscerally to Hugo as I respond more depply to great art in general. My primary appeal to readers is that they don't do Hugo the disservice of reading an abridged version of this novel. You may not be all that interested in the causes behind the rebellion that led to Marius's mounting of the barricade, but I assure you you will not be bored by the lengthier version. Great writers don't waste their time on superfluous details. Every word is there for a reason. Let the Master of the House display his wares in full.

I bought this Norman Denny translation in January 2013. Originally, I'd gotten the Isabel F. Hapgood translation (the one with the silhouette of a reading girl surrounded by cat-tails) on my Kindle. However, the spaces between paragraphs were too wide, so I had to flip pages quite often. This got quite annoying after 450 pages. Also, the language in the Kindle edition was a little difficult to understand, and there were random accent marks on random words -- the editing wasn't the best. However, the Norman Denny translation's easy to understand (the English is the English we speak in the 21st Century, and not what was spoken in the 19th Century). There might have been some spelling or grammatical errors, but far less than in the Kindle edition. While I was reading the Kindle edition, I kept on glancing at the percentage metre to see when I would hit the next percent. Because it was a Kindle e-book, I could only rely on the percentage metre to see how far I was in the book. Also, when I got to one of those useless rants about social injustice, I kept on having to hit the "Go To" button to go to the Table of Contents and see how many more chapters I had to endure of the boring stuff. With the hard-copy book, I could just flip through the book until I found the next chapter. This translation in itself's fine, but the content isn't. First, there are the useless rants about social injustice that nobody really cares about. Victor Hugo might have been right about the social issues in the 1860's, but why would he put them in a romance novel? He ought to have taken all his rants from Les Mis and put them in separate essays. Gladly, according to what one of my friends who read this Les Mis translation said, Norman Denny gets rid of at least 50 pages of Hugo's rants. Second, in Part I, Book I ("An Upright Man"), Hugo dedicates the first 50 pages of his great masterpiece to talking about the daily life and good deeds of the extremely nice Bishop of Digne. Although the Bishop figures in only 100 pages of the 1400 page book, Hugo describes him the most. Alright, we get the point that the Bishop's the nicest bloke in the world! Third, Hugo dedicates another 50 pages to an epic description of the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo. He finally gets to some story in the last two pages. Hugo mentions places such as Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Braine-l'Alleud, Mont-Saint-Jean, Genappe, Nivelles, etc. that nobody knows about. All those locations are somewhere in southern Belgium and northern France, but only locals would know the places. As these locations figure quite prominently in Part II, Book I ("Waterloo"), it's quite difficult trying to understand the Battle of Waterloo if you don't know where any of the locations are. If locations aren't confusing enough, Hugo mentions people such as Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, Halkett, Mitchell, Somerset, etc. that nobody knows about. Personally, the only names I recognised in "Waterloo" were "the Duke of Wellington" and "Napoleon". Because the Battle of Waterloo only occurred about 50 years after Les Mis was first published, Hugo expects his audience to know who Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, etc. were. However, it's almost 200 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and people only recognise the names of the two principal generals/commanders -- the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Even so, some people only know who Napoleon is, and not the Duke of Wellington. I read "Waterloo" on my Kindle, so I kept on going to the Table of Contents and looking at all the chapters in "Waterloo" to see how much longer I had to endure it. Fourth, in Part II, Book VI ("Le Petit-Picus"), Hugo uses 30 pages to explain the history of the Petit-Picus convent. Seriously? The Petit-Picus convent only figures in about 100 pages out of 1400 pages. The convent's also extinct -- it died about 150 years ago. Fifth, in Part II, Book VII ("The Convent as an Abstract Idea"), 15 pages are dedicated to explaining as to why a convent is actually a prison. Why doesn't Victor Hugo just put all that rubbish in another essay, instead of in Les Mis? Sixth, the name of Part IV, Book I ("A Few Pages of History") is a serious misnomer. Thirty-four pages of history isn't considered "a few pages of history". Seventh, in Part IV, Book VII ("Argot"), 20 pages are used to talk about slang. Evidently, the slang of the 1830's is completely different from the slang of the 2010's. So why can't Victor Hugo get rid of all that rubbish? Eighth, in Part V, Book II ("The Entrails of the Monster"), Hugo uses 20 pages to describe the Paris sewers. Although the sewers might have some prominence, overall, they're not that important. I made the mistake of reading "An Upright Man", "Waterloo", "Le Petit-Picus", "The Convent as an Abstract Idea", "A Few Pages of History", and "The Entrails of the Monster". Fortunately, I didn't read "Argot". Whenever I was reading these seven sections, I kept on thinking, "Mr. Hugo, can we PLEASE get on with the story?". PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF READING THESE SEVEN SECTIONS. THEY ARE A WASTE OF YOUR TIME. YOU WILL REGRET IT IF YOU DO! Otherwise, read everything else. Les Mis is actually quite good -- just not the eight sections. The title of this review is "Monsieur Gillenormand Lives", because my favourite character in Les Mis is Monsieur Gillenormand, the 90-year-old grandfather of Marius Pontmercy, one of the main characters. I think Norman Denny's representation of Monsieur Gillenormand is marvelous. Monsieur Gillenormand was the only character who made me laugh in a serious book. My second favourite character was Grantaire, who was quite comical as well, but not as much as Monsieur Gillenormand.

I finished this book a few days ago, and I miss it. It's sort of strange. I had a similar experience when I finished Lord of the Rings, but I think this is worse. I loved nearly everything about this book, even when it wasn't exciting or emotional, I was fascinated. My only serious complaint was the sewer chapter, but that was merely the timing of it (I skimmed some of that section, but went back and read it fully afterwards). I have been a fan of the musical since I was six and have wanted to read the book for year, but just never had the reading stamina. The book adds so much detail and emotion to the musical. I'm very glad I waited until I was disciplined enough to get through this book in its entirety. It has been nearly a month since I finished this book and I still cannot stop thinking about it. I have a feeling I may end up rereading this book within the year, because it just has not let go of me. A word of warning for the Wilbur translation, though it says that it is not abridge, it basically is. There are several sections that are moved to an appendix at the end of the book. I marked the place where they were supposed to be so that I could read them in their intended place. The part about the convent is a bit tedious, but the bit about Argot was really interesting. Make sure you read that one because you will miss out on some interesting stuff.

I'm 400 pages through so far, and love this book. I have never seen the musical, or any of the movies, heard any of the music, or really know anything about the story. To be honest, I didn't even know it was a book until a friend mentioned that it was in his top 10 of favorite books of all time! Coming from him, who is quite a manly dude, warranted an investigation by my part. I'll continue to update this review as I read the book, but keep in mind it is a THICK read, covering around 1200 pages or so. Much of it is ancillary information that didn't really add too much to the story (yet?), as in there was about 100 pages or so talking in great detail about the battle of Waterloo; information I could have gotten from a history book. However the story is compelling, well written, and you become almost instantly attached to the main characters, pulling for them, hoping for them, really yearning for them to do the right things and to overcome. One of my favorite characters in the book was the Bishop of Digne, who apparently is barely mentioned in the musical or movie. The book provides a wealth of background on his character, which, in talking to diehard fans of this story, greatly entertained them. So even if you're seen the musical, the movie, or know the basic story, I'd recommend reading it due to all of the extra stuff in the story that didn't make the musical.

Prompt delivery!

For those who are only fans of the musical (which I had been), the book is so, so much better. I do not know French, so I don't know how "accurate" this translation is, but, as with most Penguin Classics imprints, it is eminently readable. Do not be turned off by the novel's size; despite Hugo's occasional digressions (I really didn't need to know quite so much about the French sewer system!), most of "Les Miserables"'s girth is completely justified. The most surprising difference from the musical is how much more of an ensemble effort the book is: there are large portions of the text in which Valjean is not present, but we get a far completer picture of the rest of the cast--and structurally and thematically it is all relevant. Suspense is also well-handled in that Hugo does not present the reader with more information than he needs. As a religious meditation, what Hugo has to say is also worthy.