Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

I saw a high school's production of the play Les Misérables and decided I wanted to read it as one of my classics in the 2010 Mixology challenge. My son happened to have an abridged copy and I began reading it in the beginning of the month. It is truly a big book.

One problem (or not) that I had with this particular edited version is that several sections of Les Misérables was left out. The editor had notes which described certain portions of the text that had been deleted and in other places, merely stated that such-and-such part or chapter had been left out. At times I didn't understand exactly what was going on and wondered if everything would have been explained by the missing material. On the other hand, I tend to get bored with preachy or dry facts and will skip over it or not absorb it anyway.

Les Miserables is not just one character's story as I originally believed. It's the stories of several. The main one revolves around Jean Valjean, though, a very tragic sort of guy. As a young man, he steals a loaf of bread to feed his widowed sister's children, is caught and sent to prison for years. He makes two attempts at escape and has more years tacked on. After he's released, he eventually changes and becomes a "good" man but just can't escape that past.

There's a dedicated fanatical police inspector, Javert, who will never give up the hunt and is like one of those crazy dogs that attaches itself to someone's ankle and would rather die than let go.

There's little Cosette rescued from human-demons who were fostering her by Jean Valjean, at the age of 8.

There's her very tragic mother, Fantine.

The first half of the book was great! I thought it was one of the best books I'd ever read.

In the second half, though, the focus of the story shifted to a love story between Cosette and Marius.

I thought I might like Marius at first, a poor young lawyer who'd defied his rich grandfather and gone out into the world on his own. Marius began to develop as an independently thinking human being. One day he's going for his usual walk when he sees and falls in love with the beautiful Cosette, also on a walk with her own father. Cosette also notices Marius and falls right back in love with him.

One night, though, he becomes involved in trying to rescue Jean-Valjean from the demon foster parents. It turns out demon foster father "rescued" Marius' father at the Battle of Waterloo. Actually, the father was being robbed but didn't realize it. Anyway, he's so grateful to the thief that at his death he charges Marius with doing anything possible to help this loser. When Marius realizes who this loser actually is, he freezes and I became thoroughly disgusted with him.

I'm leaving out the next important chunk of the story but that's only because I'm too lazy to go into it all and because I was so disgusted with Marius I just didn't enjoy the mini-revolution by a small band of martyrs.

This is one of the greatest stories ever written though. Seriously.

I'm also fitting this book into the "New Authors" challenge because I've never read anything by Victor Hugo before.