It Took Months...

... but I finally finished Les Misérables. No, not the Broadway musical. No, not one of the umpteen film versions. No, not the video game. No, not Orson Welles' 7-part radio series. No, not the Japanese anime version. No, not the 26-part North Korean animated series. No, not the puny little abridged version, with its paltry four hundred sixteen pages.

Yes, the 1,232 page beast. You know, the one with the 60+ page asides on the Battle of Waterloo, the two or three chapters of opining about how the excrement of Parisians is not sufficiently valued for its array of wondrous properties, the long disquisitions on criminal argot and the admirable absurdities of monastic life. Oh, yeah, and the one with that Jean Valjean / Cosette story.

So, what did I think of what may well be the most famous novel in all of the history of French literature?

It was all right.

Well, I guess I can say a bit more than that. It is almost difficult not to read the book as a truly (if inadvertently) postmodern novel. Of course it's not postmodern in the way Don Quijote is postmodern (or modern, or premodern, or all of the above or none of the above. Take your pick). But it does seem almost postmodern in the way it gleefully pushes the form of the novel to the breaking point, snaps it, and keeps on going like nothing happened. Philosophy, history, military tactics, aesthetics, religion, it's all grist for Hugo's mill. "That's just the modern novel," you say. "Just look at those long-winded Russians or Proust." Well, yes, they were loquacious too. But if nothing else, Les Misérables confirms once again that the birth of the novelist is the death of the editor. I guess the thing about Hugo's novel is that there's so much of it. Put it this way: it wallows in excess in a way that has at least a whiff of the postmodern about it. And speaking of smells, I think that his extended discussion of Parisian merde may entitle us to identify Hugo as the father of contemporary cultural studies (you may think that a laudable or an execrable achievement).

But the story, man, what about the story? Talk about a flawed masterpiece: eloquent and insightful descriptions side-by-side with the most banal armchair pontificating I've ever seen. But, yeah, the rube in me liked it. The academic in me would need to do a lot more work to figure out why.