Les Miserables (Penguin Classics)

Thank God I got the Kindle version for my Kindle Keyboard 3G. I read through 12% of the book before wondering 'how long will it take me to finish!!?". So I measured my reading speed pages-per-minute and estimated the total reading time for the entire book to be 64 hours. Seriously. So I took a different approach: I would read for an hour or two, then when fatigue started setting in, I pressed the "shift-sym" keyboard shortcut to activate text-to-speech, and just sat back or laid in bed while the kindle AI voice read it to me. This book famously takes place in France, and a lot of the names of people / places / streets are in French, so it's nice having the AI effortlessly pronounce them. My favorite was hearing it pronounce "Champs-Élysées" over and over again. It was pleasant, almost hypnotizing. Text-to-Speech allowed me to focus on the incredible story and not hassle through the pronunciations. Victor Hugo goes off on many tangents, such as 30+ page histories of the battle of waterloo, and the construction of the sewer system in Paris. It's quite fascinating and adds much to the story. There are many nuanced scenes that I continually go back to in my head, like the back passages behind the court room for transporting lawyers, and the one for transporting the criminals. And the ideas of whether a person can ever redeem themselves in society, contrasted with the situation that society is often times a poor judge of how to redeem oneself, and whether they should be deserving of redemption. It is an honest critique of criminal justice that is probably as relevant today as it was then. My understanding is that this "penguin classics" version has a better translation than the "free" version going around on the internet. It you're going to devote ~64 hours to an experience of life and death in old France, best put in a few bucks to get the best translation possible. For today's generation, the length of the story can be a bit jarring and leaves you wondering "will this story ever end?" I say this book is not at all to be treated as a story. It's not a television show. It's not a movie. It's not a musical. Les Miserables is an EXPERIENCE. So get the good version on Kindle, and have the AI voice continue the reading when fatigue starts to set in.

How can you leave anything less than 5 stars on the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables? unless... unless! you own a paperback copy of the Penguin Classic and wanted to used said copy as a working copy that you could underline, mark up, and make notes in the margin and then have this "illustrated" hard backed copy with hopefully slightly better paper than the paperback's newspaper-like quality to have on the shelve to revisit. The illustrations? Well, there is a silhouette of a bird on the title page and there is the cover art - and that's it for that. The paper quality is no better than the paperback version. I'm not sending it back because it was a good deal and finding the Norman Denny translation is difficult (I'm still searching for an e-book version.) So, thank goodness for the quality of the author. I have a feeling that like Cervantes Don Quixote, I will be perpetually re-reading this incredible work.

I'm glad to see so many young people drawn to the book via the musical or the movie versions. If there were one writer I would want to know on a personal basis via his work it would have been Victor Hugo. He must have had an enormously generous heart and spirit as evidenced by his writing. This is probably the most sympathetic, almost God-like perspective of humanity that I have ever come across in literature. And what a sweeping cyclorama Hugo portrays. From the fields of Waterloo to the sewers of Paris, Hugo's eye of god sees everything. The Waterloo passages are often discarded in the abridgements, but to me they play an important part in allowing the reader to pull back and look at things from this god-like point-of-view. The great panoramic macrocosm of history is seen in conjunction with the vivid details of Jean Valjean's microcosmic struggle. Of course the characters, which I thought were rather cleverly encapsulated in the musical, are here given their true range and scope. That Hugo loved these characters is abundantly clear. This love is absorbed by the reader. Every time Jabert comes close to capturing Jean, it is as if we were in Jean's shoes. Hugo far outshines Dickens in his depiction of lower class existence in a 19th century European city. His Paris is inhabited by much more convincing urchins. All his characters in fact, are much more believable. Dickens is much more overtly sentimental. Hugo lets the story affect the reader. There is no sense of straining to convey an effect. With Dickens, I am always aware of the puppetmaster straining to get a point across. He is a polemical writer compared to Hugo. He relies on heavy-handed bathos. Hugo remains much more in the background and we are left essentially unaware of his machinations. That's why, for me, I respond more viscerally to Hugo as I respond more depply to great art in general. My primary appeal to readers is that they don't do Hugo the disservice of reading an abridged version of this novel. You may not be all that interested in the causes behind the rebellion that led to Marius's mounting of the barricade, but I assure you you will not be bored by the lengthier version. Great writers don't waste their time on superfluous details. Every word is there for a reason. Let the Master of the House display his wares in full.

The book arrived in excellent condition.

Ottimo

大当たり！ ページの黄ばみは、中古の洋書の典型。気になりません。表紙が少し破けてはいたのですが、許容範囲でしょうか。 本自体は、Norman Denny訳 (Penguin Classics)。今までで読んだレ・ミゼラブルの中で一番読みやすいエディションです。 他の出品者さんから、模造品のような本も出ているので、どの翻訳でどの出版社の本なのかを念入りに確認した方がいいと思います。このような商品に当たってしまってから、2冊目に購入したこの本が大当たりでした。

It's a good summary with some help for the vocabulary that can be very helpful if you are learning or are a teacher, for instance. However, in my case I just wanted to read the whole original which I had already read in Spanish so I first read the summary in French and then downloaded the original version for Kindle (for free) along with the French dictionary.

Buen libro, es el tercer libro con este tipo de tapa que tengo y siempre son muy buenos. Tienen algo de contexto histórico y de historia del autor antes de empezarlo para entenderlo mejor