Alright: I was massively disappointed with this novel. "Soul-moving," "timeless," "part of the canon" and other such phrases led me to believe Hugo might be on to something. But...no. Not really, no.
The basic premise is that an ex-convict, Jean Valjean, is released from prison after 19 years. He was imprisoned for a petty crime, but people treat him as if he massacred a crew of nuns. He consequently spends the first chunk of the book being a jackass and trying to get back at society by (unsuccessfully) robbing a bishop (who lets him get away with it, and gives him help, to boot) and swiping 40 sous from a kid. I liked that part. He was interesting -- a semi-reformed man, unjustly imprisoned, with a grudge against society. I can buy it. Cliched, but believable.
Then, we meet Fantine and Cosette. Fantine needs to leave her baby, Cosette, so that Fantine can go find work in the provinces. She (surprise!) picks a horrible family, cribbed straight out of Cinderella. Cosette grows up miserable and abused. And how.
I actually came up with a theory that Hugo was mocking melodramatic tripe through his description of Cosette's childhood. "And the dog--a flea-infested mongrel with bad breath--was her only friend. But then the family killed the dog. And she was all alone. In the dark. And she had to eat under the table." Paraphrased, not quoted, but still. It's all like that. Cosette remains (of course) wonderful and charming and lovely and happy and ARGH. Damn you, Hugo, you weren't messing with the readers! You think she's a believeable character. Bah. Maybe she'll die of TB. Keep reading.
Oh, okay; we're back to Jean Valjean. He's undergone a miracle transformation into an absolute saint. (Really. He breaks into people's homes to LEAVE money.) He's also now the owner of a huge factory, where he treats everyone wonderfully. However, he goes by an alias since he's now a wanted criminal. (The kid he robbed of 40 s. reported him.)Guess who works in his super happy funtime factory? Yep. We <3 plot convenience.
Unfortunately, Fantine is dying of the horrible Mystery Illness. She makes this complete stranger (and her boss) promise to go fetch Cosette. Fantine croaks first, though. Valjean is then discovered by a police inspector Javert and has to flee his village. He grabs Cosette (luckily, this was before Nabokov wrote a similar story about an old dude and a kid) and they live together in a saintly, saccharine-sweet manner. She dotes on him, and vice versa. The reader cries with boredom.
Enter Marius, the worst of the lot. Cosette's growing and getting cute. Marius is growing from insipid, clueless orphan living with his grandfather to an emo, annoying man living by himself and stupidly estranged from his grandfather and constantly whining. He falls for Cosette (though they NEVER SPEAK) and she for him. They walked by one another in the park and, ah me. L'amour. (It's like Romeo and Juliet, only incredible lame. And at least they spoke before Romeo started claiming to be in love.)
Thank god, Hugo then had a moment of weakness and accidentally made a character interesting for a minute: Valjean gets jealous. Cue Hallelujah Chorus. The saint has emotion! The man too holier than thou to think bad thoughts about people who exiled him actually ENVIES! He does so in the mildest way possible, of course, but still. He's alive, folks!
Of course, Hugo realizes his mistake and kills off that trait, fast. M and C get married (bleh) after Valjean simultaneously comes to his sesnses and stops hating M, saves M's life at this very stupid semi-revolutionary wannabe barricade battle M is somehow involved in (don't ask me, they didn't explain it in the book either), and facilitates M's obscenely melodramatic reconciliation with his grandfather. All in a few hours. Like I said, Hugo can out-George Lucas George Lucas.
It's all downhill from there. I wish I hadn't read on. I think I lost brain cells. M finds out his father in law, who he previously revered as a saint, was once a convict. So he tells Valjean to go away and not contact C again. Valjean, saintly little twit that he is, agrees. Eventually, as Valjean is on his deathbed, Marius spontaneously has a change of heart, and brings C to see Valjean in time for Valjean to fork over a huge inheritance and then die. C is now rich. Yay. She's also too insipid to even muster the thought that maybe -- maybe -- her idiot husband did wrong in depriving her of her surrogate dad and sending him to die in a cold attic.
So, things I liked about this book: Javert. The Inspector. He's a little flat ("Find. Convict. Must. Find. Convict.") but he actually THINKS towards the end of the book, making him unique among the characters. He revises an opinion. Holy shit. I had to re-read that page. It's amazing. Someone did something UNUSUAL.
Uhh...hmm...what else did I like? Uhhhh...yep. That's about it. The characters were hackneyed, flat, and utterly unsympathetic. Cosette was an idiot, Valjean was so saintly I'm surprised he didn't dissolve into a stack of communion wafers, Marius was a holier-than-thou twit. The interesting people, like the bishop who Valjean robbed at the beginning, never appeared again.
In addition, the plot was awful. There are only so many preposterous coincidences one can squish into a 300 page book, and Hugo easily septupled that number. Then, he also dropped a whole bunch of plot lines. (Probably because they would have added character depth.) One minute, he's talking about Marius's dad owing a HUGE FRIGGIN' DEBT of honor to Thenardier ad Marius swearing (over about 40 pages) to find and repay this noble being. The next minute, Marius does find him, and...nothing happens. He doesn't report Thenardier for a crime, and drops the subject.
Don't bother with this book. Maybe I read the wrong translation. Maybe I'm just too cynical to accept that everyone in the world is actually perfect and dreeeeeaaaaaamssss....come truuuuuUUUUUUUUueeeeee...but I don't think so. I think this book is just vastly overrated. The characters were awful and none were at all believable. The plot was so hackneyed as to prove hilarious at times. ("Ohhh, I bet that random bystander is actually Javert! Oh, hey! He is!") The historical context and the side characters are the only good parts. And they're not worth 300 pages of bad dialogue where nobody talks, choosing instead to cry out or exclaim.
Apologies for the long rant. This book was long, tedious, and I wanted to share my pain. Bah humbug. Last time I listen to a French teacher for literature recommendations. Pfft. Next she'll tell me this "Voltaire" fellow is worth my time. (Kidding.)
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Maybe he was on a rebound from The Hunchback from Notre Dame. Because there, everything goes wrong. The beautiful woman is tortured, the handsome lover is a jerk, the ugly hunchback dies embracing the corpse of the woman who was too busy longing for the handsome jerk who ignored her, the priest is diabolically evil...
Granted, I've only read an abridged version of Hunchback, but that stuff is all in it. Quite an about-face, eh?
Plus Javert is a badass. I've only ever seen movie versions (never read it and probably won't either), but I always liked Javert.
Yeah, he is. And in the book, he is easily the most complicated and compelling character. For he record, when your unforgiving villain is the most sympathetic character, you're doing it wrong, dammit.
Dropping by four months after the fact to note that if the plot seems hackneyed and illogical, it's probably because you read a 300-page abridgement of a 1500-page book.
I mean, I make no excuses for the insipid Marius/Cosette love story, but it sounds like this version made no mention of Valjean's thirty-page crises of conscience, Fantine being a whore, Valjean stowing away in a nun's coffin and almost getting buried alive, half of the Marius-Thénardier subplot, Marius' crazy stalker girl, Valjean's extended jealous snit (and the subsequent guilt that makes him distance himself from Cosette at the end), or the ambiguously gay revolutionary cabal. Or in other words, most of the parts that involve the characters either being interesting or kicking ass. Or making the plot semi-coherent.
If Hugo's style doesn't do it for you, there's no need to read a thousand more pages of it--but the unabridged version does at least make sense.
(Yeah, I'm a fan of the book. And I'll admit it could easily be cut to half its length without losing much, but all of the abridged versions seem hellbent on slicing it down to a fifth of the original and destroying everything that makes it interesting in the process.)
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