I have done what I always do with big books and spent a year and change juggling the first half along with five other books, reading very slowly, then got my act together and spent a month finishing (the first (600-page) volume of) this thing. Iāll read the rest later but will take a break for now.
Itāsā¦ great, of course.
Maybe telling on myself but I like the authorās āopinionated assertiveness in narration,ā for lack of a better term. Hugo describes historical events, milieux, social institutions etc. and then explains what he, the author, thinks about them outside the fiction, which is helpful for me as an ignoramus in grappling somewhat with these things I know little-to-nothing about, and fun to engage with even if you disagree with what he claims along the way (this kind of rhetoric usually comes with pretty broad assumptions about class, culture, nations, etc). Part 2, Book 6 describes a particular convent in favorable terms, then in Book 7 Hugo-as-himself comes out and explains his conflicted, predominantly negative feelings about monasticism in general in the (then-)modern world, and about convents in particular during the time when the story takes place. Stick that in your musical, I dare youā¦!
I also enjoy when a protagonist character disappears, we skip ahead in time, some supposedly different character appears, and it carries on like this until the author goes ābut of courseā¦ we have been discussing none other than Jean Valjean all along.ā Do authors still do this? Is this just a 19th century adventure book thing?
To the point of the thread, I am thinking more afterward about (1) how I was not equipped to understand the majority of it in high school, both when I tried it (unabridged) on my own and when it (abridged) was later assigned reading (despite this, I believe itās good to punch above your weight when reading, especially as a kid/teen); and (2) thatāeven if (1) were not the caseāthat the pedagogy employed to teach literature to U.S. high school students is really not sufficient to even begin digesting a book like this. The difficulty is endemic to a book like Les MisĆ©rables, which besides clearly being for adults is explicitly moral/political, but I have to wonder if there isnāt at least a better way to try, to prime students to eventually understand the material. In my high school we would usually skirt around anything polemical (mention The Jungle as broadly important but donāt actually read it), teachers avoided expressing their opinions too strongly; donāt want to have a disagreement and get parents calling in about how you said something about the police, etc., or more charitably they want the kids to figure it out. Regarding this book in particular we read a version that was just the plot action, and class ādiscussionā was entirely focused on recalling specific details of that plot, who did what at what time on what page. I feel sort of cheated, retroactively, even though the best of educations would not have been able to force a high school version of myself to understand so rich a text as this.