Today I celebrate the completion of my reading of Les Miserables – 1800 pages, or,
according to counting system of the Kindle
on which I read it, 25939 “parts.”
It is a towering achievement. Les
Miserables, not my finishing reading it.
Okay, both.
First of all, a book written in 1862 that is still enormously
worth reading in 2014 – I mean, check the latest New York Times “Best Sellers” list and tell me which books they
will still be enjoying in 2166. *
(* At this point, “Conventional Comedy Writing” requires me
to insert, by way of contrast, the name of a book whose popularity is unlikely
to last beyond next month. In our business, we call that a “Name Joke”,
where an appropriate person’s name or, in this case, a book title, is a clay
pigeon for hilarious ridicule. Though
they appeal to others, I myself have little enthusiasm for “Name Jokes.” Though you may feel free to insert and example
of your own. Maybe something by Bill
O’Reilly. Man, I just could not help
myself.)
What I just did there in the parentheses was a diversion,
which, aside from the fact that I like to do them, is entirely appropriate in
this context, because, as I mentioned earlier, interspersed between the
chapters involving love and redemption played out against the backdrop of a
popular rebellion (not that popular,
it turned out, the result being that the insurgents were brutally massacred), Les Miserables author Victor Hugo
chooses on numerous occasions to stop the narrative dead in its tracks, and to discourse
at length upon various topics of personal interest.
I have already talked about the one in which the protagonist
Jean Valjean, escaping apprehension, inadvertently stumbles upon the terrain
upon which the Battle of Waterloo was fought, providing Hugo the opportunity –
actually, he provided it to himself;
Jean Valjean could have run away anywhere
– but anyway… Hugo determines to give Valjean a breather, according a
substantial number of chapters that advance the story in no way whatsoever to discussing
the monumental confrontation between Napoleon and Wellington. (For those of you who missed the paper that
day, Wellington won.)
That digression, I
actually enjoyed. It occurred relatively
early in the storytelling, and so, did little to impede the narrative
momentum. Plus, the specifics of the
Battle of Waterloo were of interest to me. Later digressions, however, tried my contemporary “Get on with it!” patience to a substantially greater degree.
Battle of Waterloo were of interest to me. Later digressions, however, tried my contemporary “Get on with it!” patience to a substantially greater degree.
For example…
At the climactic moment in the story, Jean Valjean is
struggling through the cavernous underbelly of the city, carrying a dying
Marius on his shoulders, in an effort to rescue him from certain death at the
barricades, and to get his “ward’s” seriously wounded lover to a doctor.
Once again, Hugo places the story on “Pause” – this time,
just when it is getting exciting – halting the narrative to treat his readers
to an extended lecture on the derivation and general functioning of “Sewer
System of Paris.”
That one, I pretty much skimmed over, a reflection of, in
contrast to the author’s, my minimal interest in subterranean sludge.
I realize that novels from other eras are subject to the
stylistic differences of their Period (he said, like the inveterate reader of
fiction he is not.) Les Miserables’ approach, I would imagine, is a natural consequence
of the era in which it was written.
Melodramatic plotting, maddening coincidences (There is a
grate at the end of the sewer blocking Valjean’s escape, until, out of nowhere,
a character with a key for the gate materializes), the surfeit of verbosity – leading
one to secretly wonder whether the author was perhaps being paid by the word – and the aforementioned extensive
digressions.
Maybe that’s just the way books were written back then. And nobody was surprised. (And, as I suggested earlier, they were
possibly even grateful, because completing the book created the option of going
outside, into an uncertain world of pestilence and crime.)
There was, however, one
stylistic device that simply threw me for a loop, rendering me unsure of my
comprehensional footing, my reaction being similar to the response I
experienced upon first glimpsing that cartoon where the skier sees his ski
treads surrounding both sides of a tree.
Now understand here. Hugo is nothing if not painstakingly detailed
in his description. A defender of the
barricade about to be killed by the National Guard is shot down by “eight
bullets.” That is the number of bullets
the author has chosen to riddle him with.
Not nine bullets. Not seventeen.
Monsieur Hugo is writing at his desk, he arrives at the “Mowed
Down In a Hail Of Bullets” moment, he considers the number of bullets he would
like to have rain down upon the victim, and he decides that the appropriate
number for this slaughter will specifically
be eight. Not seven – okay, we’ve been there.
Later in the book, however, Hugo describes a man’s escape
from incarceration, during which, after freeing himself from his cell, the
felon finds himself stranded high on the rooftop of the prison that was previously
holding him captive.
Then Hugo, in more or less the following words – the precise
words I do currently not recall, and am unwilling to dive back into the 25939 Kindle “parts” to find them – writes
this:
“How he escaped has never been entirely explained.”
Say, “What!?!”
The man is writing this story. Every detail is entirely under his control. Why?
Because he is making the whole
thing up!
He made up “eight bullets.”
Why didn’t he make up how he escaped?
I’ll tell ya, that one made me dizzy. “Never entirely explained"? I could not get my head around that. The only thing that came to mind was that
Victor Hugo, in an attempt to simulate being a reporter of actual details,
pretended that some of the events, like the “eight bullets”, were
journalistically knowable, and some of them, like how the guy escaped, were not.
I just wonder how he decided when he knew them and when he
didn’t.
I feel honored to have experienced Les Miserables. (And my
reading of the source material speaks well of the musical version’s successful
condensation.) Kindle permits me to take on big, heavy books without straining my
arthritic thumb joints. So I will
probably do it again.
Let us hope, however, that I will never be subjected to the muck
and mire of any further sewer excursions.
I mean, going into the sewers literally is okay.
But I can easily do without the blueprints.
1 comment:
So the man's escape is the pineapple in HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, and the sewer digression just needs Art Carney to make it hilarious.
Good to know that there is such perfect contuity from Hugo's time to ours. :)
wg
PS: I'm fairly sure that the Kindle has a search function that will allow you to locate anything in those 28000 parts with great efficiency. Or at least, greater efficiency than searching the physical book.
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