Ce n’est rien de mourir; c’est affreux de ne pas vivre. --Les Misérables It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live. --from Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being. It was Leo Tolstoy who vindicated [Hugos] early ambition by judging Les Misérables one of the worlds great novels, if not the greatest… [His] ability to present the extremes of experience as they are is, in the end, Hugos great gift. —From the Introduction by Peter Washington Everymans Library It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live. --from Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:03:03 +0000
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