Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [470]
Director Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror and Smilla’s Sense of Snow) remains strictly faithful to Hugo’s text and sets his 1998 film of Les Misérables in early-nineteenth-century France. This sweeping costume drama, which stars Liam Neeson as Valjean, avoids political overtones and concentrates instead on the adversarial relationship between the persevering Valjean and Geoffrey Rush’s icy Javert, characters who are more similar than different. The all-star cast includes Uma Thurman as a pallid Fantine, Claire Danes as Cosette, and Hans Matheson as Marius.
In 2000 director Josée Dayan, screenwriter Didier Decoin, and actor Gérard Depardieu collaborated in a faithful, made-for-television adaptation. The three talents, who had collaborated on The Count of Monte Cristo and a bio-pic of Balzac, convey the grit, grimness, and grime of pre-Revolution street life. The film stars Depardieu as Jean Valjean and John Malkovich as his nemesis Javert.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables through a variety of voices and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE
Fantine, the first of five novels under the general title of Les Misérables, has produced an impression all over Europe, and we already hear of nine translations. It has evidently been “engineered” with immense energy by the French publisher. Translations have appeared in numerous languages almost simultaneously with its publication in Paris. Every resource of bookselling ingenuity has been exhausted in order to make every human being who can read think that the salvation of his body and soul depends on his reading Les Misérables. The glory and the obloquy of the author have both been forced into aids to a system of puffing at which Barnum himself would stare amazed, and confess that he had never conceived of a “dodge” in which literary genius and philanthropy could be allied with the grossest bookselling humbug. But we trust that, after our American show man has recovered from his first shock of surprise, he will vindicate the claim of America to be considered the “first nation on the face of the earth,” by immediately offering Dickens a hundred thousand dollars to superintend his exhibition of dogs, and Florence Nightingale a half a mil lion to appear at his exhibition of babies.
The French bookseller also piqued the curiosity of the universal public by a story that Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables twenty-five years ago, but, being bound to give a certain French publisher all his works after his first cel ebrated novel, he would not delight the world with this product of his genius until he had forced the said publisher into a compliance with his terms. The publisher shrank aghast from the sum which the author demanded, and this sum was yearly increased in amount, as years rolled away and as Victor Hugo’s reputation grew more splendid. At last the publisher died, probably from vexation, and Victor Hugo was free. Then he condescended to allow the present publisher to issue Les Misérables on the payment of eighty thousand dollars. It is not surprising, that, to get his money back, this publisher has been compelled to resort to tricks which exceed everything known in the whole history of literature....
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