Les Misérables

⚖The case for it

A bishop gives a paroled convict the silver he stole, and everything in this enormous book runs off that one act. Valjean spends the rest of it choosing to be better against every incentive, an arc readers call "one of the best protagonists in literature" and, half joking, "the first modern superhero." Javert opposes him without being a villain, a man whose devotion to law is sincere enough to make the pursuit tragic from both sides. Around them Hugo writes Fantine's ruin, Gavroche gathering bullets at the barricade, and Eponine, who has "more depth as a character than Cosette." Even the Waterloo digression, connected to nothing, gets called "a work of art on their own."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Hugo stops the novel to write essays on convent life, criminal slang, Waterloo, and the Paris sewers, some running seventy pages, "essays inserted at the most dramatic turning points." The sewer chapter lands mid-escape with a man's life in the balance, which is exactly why readers remember it. He introduces people the same way, with "a habit of starting about ten steps too early," including "70 pages learning about a man who virtually disappears." Cosette, the object of everyone's devotion, is "very sweet, very beautiful, very pure, very innocent... very nothing," and Marius is no better. The barricade climax runs close to three hundred pages, and readers abandon the book a third of the way in.

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings