The Poor and the Wicked

Jul-Sep 2020
The Wretched - Victor Hugo, tr. Christine Donougher – Penguin Classics, 2013
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This book is more commonly known by its French title of Les Misérables, and even more commonly through the musical which is based on it. I chose it because I wanted to read its famous depiction of the 1832 June Rebellion. What I hadn't spotted was that it is enormously long - just over 1300 pages in this edition, which makes it shorter than War and Peace, but not by much - and that the reason for this is the lengthy opinion pieces in which the author engages. Some critics love Hugo's discursive approach to novel writing, but I found it infuriating, for much the same reasons as I dislike post-modern writers like Milan Kundera.
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