According to Britannica, (n.d.), Les Misérables, novel by Victor Hugo, published in French in 1862. It was an instant popular success and was quickly translated into several languages. Set in the Parisian underworld and plotted like a detective story. Les Misérables presents a vast panorama of Parisian society and its underworld, and it contains many famous episodes and passages, among them a chapter on the Battle of Waterloo and the description of Valjean’s rescue of Marius by means of a flight through the sewers of Paris. A popular musical stage adaptation was produced in 1980. Also, in Bellos’ book, according to Michael, N. (2017), a biography of a book, rather than a person, is a relatively new wrinkle in nonfiction. When the approach succeeds, as it does with David Bellos’ “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables,’” the result can be genuinely fresh and inspiring. Bellos’ book is a major accomplishment. His warm and engaging study of Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece renews faith in the idea, so fundamental to the mysterious attraction of literature that great books of whatever age continue to be worthwhile objects of attention. In applying a melange of literary criticism, linguistics, political science and history to the study of one of the best-known, if least-understood great books of all time, he illuminates the work in a way that transcends conventional literary criticism. Bellow displays a dazzling range of erudition with lightness and easy wit, and almost every section of his book bears surprising insights. He shows, for example, how different French words for money — ranging from francs to sous to napoléons — carry subtle denotations of class, effectively becoming “sign and substance of the social injustices that ‘Les Misérables’ sought to dramatize.”
The section on the publication of “Les Misérables” is one of the most informative accounts of the mechanics of the 19th-century book business that I have ever read. The work follows the fortunes of the convict Jean Valjean, a victim of society who has been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. A hardened and streetwise criminal upon his release, he eventually softens and reforms, becoming a successful industrialist and mayor of a northern town. Despite this, he is haunted by an impulsive, regretted former crime and is pursued relentlessly by the police inspector Javert. Valjean eventually gives himself up for the sake of his adopted daughter, Cosette, and her husband, Marius. The novel’s hero, Jean Valjean, makes his fortune by starting a factory that manufactures black beads, which Bellos elegantly unpacks as a case study in niche manufacturing, right down to calculations of materials, unit costs and gross margins. He writes with clarity and grace about the complex political turbulence of 19th-century France and its effect on Hugo, most notably in his nearly two-decade exile from his homeland.
According to Sparknotes, (n.d), Hugo began writing Les Misérables twenty years before its eventual publication in 1862. His goals in writing the novel were as lofty as the reputation it has subsequently acquired; Les Misérables is primarily a great humanitarian work that encourages compassion and hope in the face of adversity and injustice. It is also; however, a historical novel of great scope and analysis, and it provides a detailed vision of nineteenth-century French politics and society. By coupling his story of redemption with a meticulous documentation of the injustices of France’s recent past, Hugo hoped Les Misérables would encourage a more progressive and democratic future. Driven by his commitment to reform and progress, Hugo wrote Les Misérables with nothing less than a literary and political revolution in mind. Occasionally, this was overreaching for the significance of the novel’s contemporary relevance. Writing of the “social mechanisms that condemn some people to poverty,” stiffly lists “factors identified by modern social scientists” in an odd-sounding attempt to prove the novel’s prescience. Later, makes the baffling statement that a certain utopian strain in Hugo’s novel led in some way to the foundation of the European Union and the United Nations.
As a rule, I am suspicious of attempts to update a novel’s merits to make it fit contemporary ideas of social value — a trend that critic Louis Menand once described as “presentizing.” Les Misérables employs Hugo’s style of imaginative realism and is set in an artificially created human hell that emphasizes the three major predicaments of the nineteenth century. Each of the three major characters in the novel symbolizes one of these predicaments: Jean Valjean represents the degradation of man in the proletariat, Fantine represents the subjection of women through hunger, and Cosette represents the atrophy of the child by darkness. In part, the novel’s fame has endured because Hugo successfully created characters that serve as symbols of larger problems without being flat devices. According to Michael, N. (2017). Bellos can relax a little: We don’t need “Les Misérables” to be the best novel of the 21st century; it doesn’t even need to be the best novel of the 19th century. He is surely right in saying that since it is “not a reassuring tale of the triumph of good over evil, but a demonstration of how hard it is to be good,” it will never go out of style. And so it might be right to remember that Hugo's original title for his novel was Les Misères, not Les Misérables: which echoed Eugène Sue's recent bestseller, Les Mystères de Paris. Overall, Les Misérables is an intense, moving, and beautiful film, and I highly suggest that you add it to your watch list. But despite its many triumphs, it lacks historical context and may leave viewers scratching their heads about basic plot elements. Les Misérables is a game with destiny: it dramatises the gap between the imperfections of human judgments, and the perfect patterns of the infinite. The reason for including so much of the world's matter was to work out how mystical the world was.
References
Britanica (n.d.). Les Miserables novel by Hugo. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Les-Miserables-novel-by-Hugo
Michael, N. (2017). ‘Les Misérables’ is not just a great story — it’s a great publishing story. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/les-miserables-is-not-just-a-great-story--its-a-great-publishing-story/2017/03/23/66c9e162-0fc5-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html
Sparknotes (n.d.). Les Miserables. Retrieved from: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lesmis/context/
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