The song of angry men

I spent the month of February re-reading Les Miserables.

This novel is 1,500 pages long. It’s basically the same story as the musical, Les Miserables, which was one of the longest-running musicals on Broadway (the musical also has a movie version with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe). The plot of the musical is remarkably faithful to the book. Both are about are a French convict, Jean Valjean, who gets released from prison in 1815 and steals some silverware from a kindly bishop. The bishop forgives him for the theft and tells him to make a good life for himself. After leaving the Bishop, Valjean adopts a new identity, founds a factory, and becomes a wealthy man and local notable.

But there’s a merciless police officer, Inspector Javert, who is obsessed with finding Valjean and returning him to prison (Valjean committed a crime in adopting a new identity, thus breaking his parole). Javert catches some other guy who he thinks is Valjean, and Valjean unmasks himself to save the innocent guy, and then he flees again. But this time he’s got a little girl in tow, the daughter of a deceased woman of the night, Fantine, who Valjean had rescued.

Then, in the second half of the musical (and book), they’re in Paris and get involved in a revolution. Not the French Revolution--a different one that takes place in 1832. The daughter, Cosette, has fallen in love with a guy, Marius, who’s on the barricades. Valjean sneaks in to rescue him, defeats Javert once and for all, and Marius gets together with Cosette.

I love this musical. I’ve listened to the soundtrack many times.

Now I’ve also read the book twice. Which seems incredible. The book is so long. The musical doesn’t really deviate from the book, but in the book, every character has a backstory that is expanded upon at great length.

For instance, that bishop that I mentioned in passing? You know—the guy who’s in the musical for just one song? He gets fifty pages in the book. He’s a Pope Francis type who moves out of his official residence (turning it into a hospital) and gives away 90 percent of his salary. You learn a bunch about his long-suffering sister too.

You learn a ton about Marius’s father, a Baron under Napoleon, and about his grandfather, an aged royalist who hates Marius’s father. You learn about all of Marius’s friends on the barricades. You get an extensive discussion of Gavroche, a little kid who embodies the free spirit of the Parisian underclass.

And then there’s little essays about so many other things. For some reason, there’s a retelling of the Battle of Waterloo. There’s an extensive (at least fifty page) discussion of a fictional nunnery where Valjean and Cosette take shelter. There’s just an endless profusion of characters and details. It is so big, so baroque, it feels like graphomania.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about Les Miserables. What is there to say? It’s a larger-than-life 19th-century novel, but it can’t easily be summarized in terms of its themes. You can say Middlemarch is about marriage, and War and Peace is about destiny, but what is Les Miserables about? Mostly it’s about redemption. Jean Valjean isn’t morally culpable for his imprisonment—Victor Hugo certainly doesn’t believe he deserves twenty years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread—but he’s been brutalized by his incarceration, and by the time he is out of prison, he has become a danger to society. He is amoral and concerned only with his own survival.

But he is redeemed by the Bishop’s belief in him. His goal, after that moment, is to become the kind of person who is worthy of the Bishop’s belief. That means he constantly chooses the path of self-sacrifice. At some point, Hugo states his aims up-front, in a pretty straightforward manner:

To write the poem of the human conscience, if only of one man, even the most insignificant man, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and definitive epic. The conscience is the chaos of chimeras, lusts, and temptations, the furnace of dreams, the cave of the ideas that shame us; it is the pandemonium of sophisms, the battlefield of the passions.

That theme, of noble self-sacrifice, gets reiterated at such length that it becomes a bit comical. When Valjean chooses to unmask himself to save the other man being convicted in his place, it is moving. But when he goes to rescue Marius, or when he decides to distance himself from Cosette so that she won’t be tarnished by his convict past, then it’s a little silly. We get it. He’s a good guy. He ignores his own interests in favor of others.

If you look past that theme, then it’s really just Victor Hugo’s voice that carries us through the book. The force of his conviction, and his tidal wave of enthusiasm for, seemingly, everything. The first time through the book, you have no idea what’s coming. Suddenly you’re reading about this horrible nunnery for fifty pages. Why? Well, maybe it’s to show that the dead hand of tradition is strangling progress. But...it’s also because Hugo is in love with this Gothic creation of his. He just enjoys writing about the rituals of this made-up nunnery and boarding school.

Like the nuns, the boarders saw their relatives only in the locutory. Not even their mothers were permitted to embrace them. Strictness on this point was carried to the following extreme: One day a young girl was visited by her mother accompanied by a little sister three years old. The young girl wept, for she wanted very much to kiss her sister. Impossible. She begged that the child at least be permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so she might kiss it. This was refused almost with indignation.

I read the first seven-hundred pages of the book over the course of a few days. The second half took me the remainder of the month. Not sure why my interest slackened during the second half of the book. This was also the period when my story collection was going on submission, and I think some of the anxiety and strong emotions made it difficult to concentrate.

Nonetheless, I do think the second half of the book is a bit weaker. The book is sub-divided into five books. The first three, Fantine, Cosette, and Marius, are full of vivid asides and startling backstories. These chapters introduce virtually all the characters who are most-famous in the novel and many more besides.

The second half of the book also contains many memorable interludes: in particular, the scenes on the barricades. But...it just doesn’t have as much juice as the first half.

I first read this book maybe fifteen years ago because Rebecca, a friend from college who was active on LiveJournal, recommended it. I want to say that she had read it in her teens and, at that point (in our twenties) was re-reading it. I have found that there is a canon of grand, epic novels that a certain kind of teenager tends to really enjoy: Wuthering Heights, The Count of Monte Cristo, Crime and Punishment. They enjoy them for the same reason that teenagers enjoy Atlas Shrugged and Gone With The Wind (two books I read as a teen and loved). When I was a kid, I never would’ve read anything written in the 19th-century, but many kids had higher aspirations than I did.

I am unqualified to judge what makes Les Miserables better or worse than Gone With The Wind, but I think much of their appeal comes from the way they transport the reader to another world, where people are still good or bad, but are also somehow bigger than in real life. In Les Miserables, you meet saints like the Bishop and you meet utter villains like the Thenardiers, and you meet stubborn old men like Marius’ grandfather—who desperately loves Marius but refuses, out of pride, to reconcile with the boy. The world in Les Miserables feels magical, like at any moment it could crack open and reveal something truly unexpected.

The effect is magnified by the long span of time since the book was released. In some passages, I genuinely had no idea if it was real or not. Like, did Paris actually have this old sewer system from the Middle Ages that nobody had ever explored, so that Napoleon had to send down an engineer to map it like he was mapping some undiscovered continent? I have no idea. But I would like to believe it did!

I recommend reading the book at least once, but perhaps twice is too much. This time I read the Fahnestock translation, which is available here.

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What’s So Great About The Great Books?

I was interviewed by Henry Oliver about my upcoming nonfiction book. I particularly enjoyed the lightning round, where he asked my opinion of various Great Books:

Oliver: Marcus Aurelius.

Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations, which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn’t do it.”

Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.”

Thanks so much to Henry both for this interview and for blurbing my book! Check out the interview here. If you want to preorder my book (coming out May 19th), you can order it on Amazon or on Bookshop or from your local bookstore.