Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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459 of 474 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WARNING TO STUDENTS, August 21, 2000
Whether you have a miserable experience or a wonderful one will be determined by which translation of *Les Miserables* you're reading.Three translations are currently available: one by Charles E. Wilbour, one by Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee (based on Wilbour), and one by Norman Denny. You can also get abridged (cut) versions. Don't get any abridged version. It's like reading a toilet paper wrapper - an almost worthless experience! If you have to write a report on *Les Miz* but prefer to skip reading it, then get the Cliffs Notes. The Cliffs Notes are better than abridged versions. If you want to read *Les Miz*, which translation is best? Simple: the Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee. First of all, the Charles E. Wilbour translation was published in 1862, the year Hugo finished writing *Les Miz*. Wilbour translated all 1200 pages of *Les Miz* in just a few months, and it shows. What Wilbour wrote isn't French, it isn't English - it isn't any known tongue. It just can't be read. (Oh sure, it can be STUDIED, and it's the version in which I first read *Les Miz*, and some parts of it are okay, since Hugo is hard to kill.) This bad translation is around only because most publishers are too cheap to pay for new translations. Norman Denny's translation is new and published by Penguin, but it's bad, too. In the biography of Victor Hugo by Graham Robb, the Denny translation is called "a Swiss cheese of unavowed omissions and [it] bears out Hugo's comments on translation as a form of censorship. The translator does admit to 'thinning out, but never completely eliminating, [*Les Miz's*] lapses.'" Hm ... lapses? Here are some other remarks by Denny about *Les Miz*: "'wholly unrestrained,' 'no regard for the discipline of novel-writing,' 'moralizing rhetoric,' 'exasperating,' 'self-indulgent.'" Hugo is hard to kill, but Denny proves it's possible: I read his translation and it's the dullest of all time. The best translation is the Lee Fahnestock/Norman MacAfee one. Signet Classics publishes it. The cover shows the drawing of the waif from the musical. This translation (and no other) gets as close to the real thing as possible, in English. If Hugo had written in English, he would have written this. You can hear Hugo's "voice" and feel his living spirit. Though not perfect (few things are), this is a great achievement. Get the Lee Fahnestock/Charles MacAfee translation (that's two people), and leave the others on the shelf!
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163 of 171 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Give me 100 pages and your life will change, May 9, 2006
Here's my story about how I came to love this book.
If you're an average schmuck, with a job (not in academia), a life, and some curiosity, this review is for you.
If you're a literary blueblood, this review isnt for you. If your sworn enemy in life used to be your closest friend until they disagreed with you about whether Beowulf was a real person, be offended by my apathy and go away. If you had to turn off the TV newscasts on 9/11 because they were getting in the way of your arguments of whether sonnets devalue prose, just move on down to the next review.
I'm not a Literature buff. I tolerated English in high school and college because I had to, skipping what I could, skimming what I could get away with, and bluffing where needed. The thought picking up a stack of books and being ditcated a marathon schedule to read them by still makes me bristle with quiet rebellion.
After school I ended up with a job with lots of down time. I decided to make use of this time going back and leisurely reading some of the 'classics' that I probably should have read before. Twain, Tolstoy, Dickens, Stowe and others pulled from the titles of Cliff's Notes (Hey, if Cliff says they're important....) Funny, but classics are much more palatable when they are read on a leisurely timeframe. Some I liked, some I couldn't care less about, but Les Miserables was, literally, a life-changing text.
I fell into Les Mis completely by accident. On day I forgot to pack whatever book I was working on that day and dug around looking for something other than Harlequins and Clancys. I picked up Hugo's Hunchback more by default than choice, liked the book, and in the closing commentary a writer mentioned that Hunchback was merely a prelude to his greatest work, Les Mis.
But starting Les Mis was a trial. French words scattered in the text were stumbling blocks. Hugo's text is a jealous mistress- it demands your full attention while reading. Les Mis is not in the genre of modern novels...grab the reader's attention in the first pages or lose them forever. I got bored reading about a bishop's daily routine. It takes 100 pages for the story to kick in. I stopped reading it twice, only to pick it back up a few months later and start all over.
But, as anyone who was read the novel can tell you, those first chapters are essential to the power of the story that follows.
I pushed my way through, got caught up in the current of the story once it began, and floated out the other side a better human being because of it.
Les Mis is a fantastic, detailed journey through human psychology. With 1400 pages, subplots, a cyclone of characters over decades of history, it can be difficult to distill WHAT the book is about into one word, but here's my try: Redemption.
Les Mis can be trying at times. Hugo is very detailed. He takes the reader though various side trips along the way. More than once he spends 100 pages setting up two pages of storyline. But his detail produces a work that is untouched in its ability to reveal the characters.
We see the difficulty in Valjean weighing wealth and praise from the multitudes against "one voice cursing in the darkness."
We see a character in Fantine pulled from innocence with a slow cruelty found nowhere else in lit: being turned for more misery (in surprising ways)like a pig on a split...with a reader helpless to intervene.
I see the police detective Javert as an embodiment of 'the system,'not necessarily as evil as one reviewer suggsets. Hugo's penchant for overly-through descriptions also allow us to see a human side that makes him much more complex. We see Javert recite all the reasons he is right....and Hugo agrees with Javert... but we see that sometimes there is a larger truth than being 'right.'
Writing this a decade later I still see in my mind one of the most powerful images in the story... a middle-aged man and a small girl, both written off by the society around them, each with little in common with the other, both clinging to each other because the other is all they have in the world.
For those who are used to watching all the loose ends coming together at the end of every hour of television, Les Mis will be a rude shift. It ends in a way that can be described as happy in its own sense though everyone doesnt ride off into the sunset or end with a joke and everyone laughing.
Frankly, I think it is impossible to appreciate the nuance of the musical without reading the unabridged text.
I finished reading Les Mis for the first time over 10 years ago. I still remember reading the last page, closing the book, and spending hours reflecting on the immensity of what I had experienced.
Girlfriend read it on my recommendation with similar effect.
Friend decided to stick it in his reading lists on my suggestion. When he started, he came to me frustrated with the slow start. "Is all this about the Bishop necessary to the story?" I said yes and he kept reading. A decade and hundreds of classic novels later still names Les Mis as his favorite book.
Shortly after reading it the first time, he recommended the book to yet another colleague looking for something to read to pass the time. As he handed it over, he issued a challenge: "Give me 100 pages, and your life will change."
He did, it did, and I now offer my friend's challenge to you!
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61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Characters, Poetic Plot Make This the Best Book Ever, April 25, 2000
By A Customer
I'm a high school sophomore amd we had to read this book for school last semester. Honestly I wasn't encouraged by it's seemingly impossible thickness, nor by its slow start. Having never before seen any Les Mis movie or play or the musical (which is ALMOST as awesome as the book) I didn't know anything about the plot or the great characters and the whole experience was new to me. This is the only book I've ever read that has kept me up hours as night just to finish one beautiful part after another. My sister made fun of me that I would always talk to the book but when the believable characters act in ways that so thoroughly move your heart it's hard to resist sighing or commentary. Hugo is truly a master at combining every element of everything human to create characters from all walks of life and intertwine them into a poetically romantic plot that can only be described as beautiful. But don't skip the descriptions just to move from event to event. Hugo, I feel, has the unique ability to convey idea and thoughts and descriptions in a way that touches your heart and makes you think and yet at the same time doesn't bog you down with flowery adjectives. The language in his page-long paragraph descriptions flow so naturally you find yourself nodding and flipping pages and before you know it you're on to the next event in the plot. My friends laughed at me when we recently traveled to Paris and I wanted to buy the two-volume unabridged original Les Miserables- even though I don't know a word of French! It is a tragedy for any person with a poetic mind or a romantic heart to miss this book-truly a human classic.
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