Victor Hugo: Les Misérables

Victor Hugo: Les Misérables

Everyman's Library

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean - a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert - Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.More...

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean - a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert - Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama - highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications - of the redemption of one human being.

Literature

 TimeFavorites

Laughter is the sun which drives winter from the human face.

Page 208

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There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

Page 897

The soul helps the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird that sustains its cage.

Page 682

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves - say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Page 112

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.

Volume 2, Page 511

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A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Page 686

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