Les Misérables
Victor Hugo, 1862
A convict, a relentless inspector and a city on the edge of revolt: a huge novel about mercy, poverty and the price of a second chance.
Victor Hugo
1802–1885
Victor Hugo writes at a scale that matches his subjects: the sewers and barricades of Paris, the tides and rocks of Guernsey. His novels are patient and digressive, full of digressions on history and architecture, and they keep returning to the same questions about mercy, duty and what people owe each other. Start with «Les Misérables» for the city and its crowds, or «Toilers of the Sea» for the sea and one man's stubborn work against it.
Feels like nature, solitude and longing.
Start with Les Misérables.
Hugo's eldest daughter Léopoldine drowned at nineteen in 1843; the novel's sympathy for orphaned and endangered children carries that private loss.
The bravest lives are often the ones nobody applauds.
For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown. Books by Victor Hugo
Toilers of the Sea
Victor Hugo, 1866
A solitary Guernsey fisherman sets out to salvage a steamship's engine from a rock in open sea, to win a girl who barely notices him.
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