Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2017–2025years
33% recommend33% neutral33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I can’t read Les Miserable in its original French (despite 5 years of high school French class), but I love it in translation. Does that make me functionally illiterate?
- Victor Hugo was born to make Tolstoy seem laconic. Tolstoy can be prolix, but Austerlitz and Borodino are critical to the action of the novel. Waterloo has a minor plot justification inn Les Miserable, but most of the twelve chapters on Waterloo are just Hugo's excuse for spinning his theories.
- I'm not going to claim to be a connoisseur of literature, so perhaps I've just overlooked the greatness. The point I was trying to make is that the book takes a great many pages to advance the plot relatively little. If you're familiar with the musical adaptation and are expecting a more plot-driven novel, you probably won't find that the book meets those expectations. I have not seen any of the movie adaptations, and cannot comment on them; on the basis of your recommendation, I probably will not.
As I recall, structurally, the novel is somewhat like The Grapes of Wrath, with expository sections interspersed with sections that directly advance the plot. I quite liked that about the Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure if I take issue with the exposition/advancement ratio in Les Miserable, or if I feel less of a connection with the period Les Miserables is set in.
For children or not, I certainly won't hold The Princess Bride up as example of greatness. I would claim that the fact that it works as a send-up of a genre, including the alleged abridgement, is illustrative of something.
