Les Miserables

“The classic story of the triumph of grace and redemption, adapted for today’s readers” by Jim Reimann

Many years ago my mother received in the mail, every month or so, a volume of the “Readers’ Digest Condensed Books” series. Each volume contained abridgments of recent books. I never quite grasped, back then, the reasoning by which one might justify reading a shortened version of a longer work. Jim Reimann’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s monumental Les Misérables fails to put to rest those childhood doubts that I have carried into adulthood.

In a brief introduction, Reimann offers something of a rationale for his adaptation. In his view, Hugo’s novel is one that should be read by many people, but “due to its great length and to language that has become increasingly difficult to understand over time, few people in our current generation have endeavored to read it.” A moment later, though, Reimann asserts that Les Misérables is a “masterpiece” with a “writing style virtually unmatched by today’s writers.” Despite its beauty, he goes on, “much of the main storyline gets lost among its many tedious portions.” Tedium, for Reimann, includes Hugo’s entire detailed intro

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Verbosity and a “virtually unmatched” writing style would seem to be strange bedfellows in any case. Les Misérables is long because its author’s broad intentions required massive space in which to be carried out. His curiosity overwhelmed him at this point, and he began to rationalize that it was okay to gaze at misfortune if his goal was to relieve it. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels. More than 1,200 pages and a plethora of digressions from the central characters and plots may tax some of “today’s readers,” but those who stay with it are treated to a literary experience that is difficult to surpass. ” Despite this attempt, Reimann’s Les Misérables reads like a plot summary, and where Hugo paints in a rich chiaroscuro, Reimann is bland and washed out. Rather than settle for a tale of one man’s salvation, readers should strive to experience the novel’s full scope as a “social and historical drama” and a “vast mirror” of the human race, of societal norms that may very well be beyond redemption.

Commenting on Stevenson’s observation, Robb might well be critiquing Reimann’s Les Misérables:

This is the touchstone of all adaptations of Les Misérables, musical or cinematic: to turn Javert, the tenacious respecter of authority, “that savage in the service of civilization,” into the villain of the piece is to deprive the novel of its dynamite, to point the finger at a single policeman instead of at the system he serves. duction of the Bishop of Digne, significant development of characters such as Fantine, his fascinating digressions, such as that on the Paris sewer system (which adds inestimable import to Jean Valjean’s flight through the sewers), and many other elements that make Les Misérables a panorama of France in the early 1800s. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable . ”

Graham Robb offers Robert Louis Stevenson’s assessment of the novel’s power:

The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. Lapses into overly-contemporary language are jarring and inexcusable: “[Marius] discovered by standing on his dresser that he could see straight through to the Jondrette’s room.

Approximate Word count = 945
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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