In all 60 hours of audiotape, I counted precisely one (1) joke. At other times, he rhapsodizes over maidenly chastity with a fervor that must have left the old lecher’s many mistresses howling with laughter. At times, Hugo succumbs to a sentimentality that would have choked Charles Dickens.

Hugo’s romantic heroine, Cosette, is (if possible) more vapid still. Hugo’s romantic hero, Marius, reminds me of the tenor lead in some mediocre 19th century operetta - handsome, pompous, boring, and stupid.

(Whatever does happen to the two younger children of the villain Thenardier, who wander into the later chapters of the book and then wander out again?) He often loses track of his own plot, leaving his characters stranded and forgotten. The idea is bad agronomy, but worse literature.Įven in the narrative passages of the novel, Hugo works on the apparent theory that his words are too precious ever to cut, piling redundancy upon repetition upon elaboration. Some of these digressions are brilliant and fascinating others are boring, irrelevant, or downright cranky: Hugo devotes dozens pages to a long exposition of his theory that France could vastly enrich itself by using the sewage of Paris as agricultural fertilizer. That huge bulk accommodates not only one of the most elaborate plots in French literature, but also a string of digressions about French slang, the relationship of Tacitus and the Roman Caesars, and the contrast between French and English wedding practices, among many, many others. Hugo’s prose masterwork, Les Miserables, stretches over almost 1300 pages. It’s almost obligatory to begin any comment on Victor Hugo with Andre Gide’s famous answer when asked to name France’s greatest poet: “Victor Hugo, alas.”

Victor hugo's miserables