An Invitation: The Declining Academic Does Les Misérables

20 Pages at a time

As always, thank you to all the kind people who stop by this space on occasion. The posts here cover a wide range, so pick and choose to your liking! This space remains free to all, so please recommend or share with others. And if you haven’t already…

All 12 of my readers may remember this post on Tolstoy’s War & Peace. For the uninitiated, War & Peace is one of those books that I had always wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to; I believe we all have books like this. Well, I finally did it, and the experience proved revelatory in many ways.

The most crucial element to enjoying the experience was the approach I took to reading the book itself—I simply read 20 pages a day until I was finished. Those 20 pages, on a given day, were just what I needed. No matter what I had going on, I could briefly drop out of my world into another. The experience wasn’t about “checking off” the book or any similar pressures; it was simply to be fully present and slowly take in what was happening to this range of characters, whether it be another round of bitter courtship politics or Napolean setting fire to Moscow (poor, sad Pierre!). The whole work, through its up and downs, was magic.

Starting a week from today, July 14th, I will begin doing the same with Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Like many, I have seen the musical, but I feel like now’s the time to read the novel. Hugo was an immensely popular figure: France’s equivalent of someone like Charles Dickens or Mark Twain.

Honestly, it’s this popularity, and the story of Victor Hugo’s funeral procession, that are bringing me to the novel. Vincent Van Gogh was painting in Paris at the time of Hugo’s death and funeral, and it was while reading a Van Gogh biography that I encountered one of the most amazing stories regarding public response to a writer’s life and death. For one writer, on June 1, 1885, over two million people lined the Paris streets and windowsills to catch even a brief glimpse of Hugo’s casket. This total was larger than Paris’s actual population at the time! Some waited through the night just to be in a position where they might witness and pay tribute. Here are a couple of famous photos:

Don’t look at the casket; look at the people’s faces in the crowd.

People on balconies, widows, rooftops…

Try to imagine a writer today drawing such a crowd out of pure respect and mourning. Over 2 million people! If 200 people showed up to my funeral I would just assume that someone ordered good barbecue for catering and that’s what sent the attendance numbers way, way up.

What drove such a widely shared passion and love for Victor Hugo? What made him so beloved by the nation he wrote for and about? That’s what I want to explore, 20 pages at a time.

I will be reading the Christine Donougher translation (Penguin Classics), which looks like this:

Starting July 14th, an important day on the French calendar, I will start the journey through Les Misérables. As I said, the schedule is 20 pages per day. With War & Peace, I read slightly above or below 20 pages depending on where chapters ended, thus some days I read 25 pages and on others I dropped in for 15 pages of a different world.

Consider this an invitation to join me, if you are interested. If people are interested, we could do some posts/chats along the way, or whatever springs to mind. We could separately watch and reconnect on whether Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, and Anne Hathaway get the job done in the 2012 film adaptation. Les Misérables is about the same length as War & Peace, so we should finish by the year 2036.

If you are interested, drop a note in the comments or just chime in when I post about the novel. If not… I’m doing it anyway, all by my Misérable self!