How Novel
I recently read The Novel Of The Century, a book on how Victor Hugo went about writing Les Miserables. It's odd, because I've never read Les Miserables.
I know the basic plot, thanks to the movies, but I haven't gotten around the reading the original. (It's on my list.)
He intended Les Miserables to be a major work. He thought of the idea in the 1830s and started writing it in 1845, getting pretty far into the five-volume work, but stopping in 1848. Hugo was part of the National Assembly and France was going through political upheavals at the time. (Actually, there were upheavals throughout the 1800s.)
With the rise of Napoleon III, Hugo was considered a traitor and had to leave the country. He eventually settled in Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, where he completed Les Miserables. He was paid a huge sum for the book and it was released in 1862, with a major marketing campaign (almost unheard of at the time).
The logistics of sending the corrections back and forth between Guernsey and the publishing house is fascinating--it was just before trains and telegraphs, and the printing presses of the time were tricky. But the publisher wanted to saturate the market (to defeat the copies, which weren't all illegal in a time of questionable copyright laws) with each volume.
The book was not well-received by the critics of the day, but was an immediate bestseller, and has been ever since. Hugo lived to 1885, so got to see his book become a classic. It was also adapted, almost immediately, to the stage, so I'm guessing he wouldn't mind the musical that so many know today.
posted by LAGuy @ 11:18 AM
3 Comments:
I find it hilarious the only French novels that anyone has heard of are adventure stories driven by plot and characters -- and yet France, for the past half-century or more, has been a bastion of the school of literary criticism that sneers at adventure stories, novels driven by plot and character rather than opaque word stylings, and anything that can be enjoyed by the "common reader".
André Gide, one of these the modern French novelist, was once asked who was the greatest French poet of all time. He responded, "Victor Hugo, alas!"
France has a long and varied intellectual tradition. Just think of all the names you can come up with off the top of your head--Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, Pascal, Montesquieu, Racine, Corneille, Rousseau, Balzac, Diderot, Stendahl, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dumas (pere et fils), Sand, De Sade, Comte, Verne, Zola, Bergson, Gide, Feydeau, Rostand, Proust, Jarry, Giradoux, Pagnol, Exupery, Anouilh, Cocteau, Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Genet.
I wonder if it's such a crushing list of influences that modern French thinkers just decided to shake it all off and say it's the reader, not the text.
I need to get Novel of the Century!. I read Les Miserables in the late 80's and parts of it still often come to mind. It is a masterful presentation of the human condition - which to my mind is the struggle between doing right (being good) vs. succumbing to baser nature, or mistaking evil for good.
But what I particularly like about the book is the juxtaposition, chapter after chapter, of history with the drama. If you have read Devil in the White City, it's like that, and I found the history of Paris from its origins to Napoleon fascinating. And Hugo works the history into the story, for example the creation of the Paris sewers which are critical later on to the plot. Great Book (better imho than anything Dickens wrote).
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