Our literary group has taken a break from Dostoevsky, but we have stayed in the nineteenth century by turning to a French writer.
We have selected Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. We collectively agreed to this great work but I got to pick out the particular edition; I went with Signet Classics' unabridged edition of the novel (ISBN 0-451-52526-4). This book has 1,463 pages of reading (the text and introduction), and it is in paperback form to save everyone money. The translation is a new unabridged work by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the classic C.E. Wilbur translation.
The length of this novel may seem formidable and by today's standards, a bit excessive. Of course there are still exceptions in today's standards, since Neal Stephenson seems to be able to get away with really long novels (like his Baroque series and recently "Anathem"). Regardless of today's standards, I think the length is necessary to apprehend the context of the novel. The great length allows a great breadth of setting and depth of the characters, and the many digressions and side notes give us structural background and if you will, a snapshot of the philosophical mindset of the people living in France in the early to mid-19th century. This gives us the historical and cultural context for all of us who are living in the early 21st century.
More importantly than the historical and cultural value of reading this novel, we will find in this story timeless ideals and universal truths about life and humanity. We will see things like justice, grace, forgiveness, kindness, and the evils of mankind like exploitation, isolation, desolation, the imperial law, the unforgiveness of the mob mentality of society, etc. This novel will plumb the depths of the human experience.
Even if the novel has it's roots in Romanticism, we will see the realism in how many of the characters treat others. There will be the great tragedy of the grinding misery of existence also found in Dostoevsky. But, because of the Romantic streak we can expect to see ideals and the sublime shining through in the texture of the story.
7 comments:
Les Misérables
use html see special characters. Its easy
Well when I was complaining about the blogger editor it was from the point of view of the average bonehead (like myself) who has not yet taught himself html. What is the actual syntax to insert the particular symbol?
I have not yet even started a formal study of html (and now that I may start, everyone has already moved on to xhtml and xml and whatnot).
if you switch to edit html mode then insert this string & #233; or & eacute; (note no space between & and the rest of the string, I forgot the escape character) or whatever else you are trying you can then see your changes by switching back to the wysiwyg (compose mode)
‰
Æ
Δ
there are many useful special characters that can be added this way, see link above.
Thanks for the tip; when I get time I will jump on it.
OK, so I thought you had to have some elaborate code phrase in HTML like you do for a picture or bold or italic or whatever. I just inserted é in the middle of my English characters in the word and it magically showed up as e acute.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, (and I paraphrase)"Any technology sufficiently advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic."
Tell me about the rabbits, George!
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