Books

Les Miserables

Victor Hugo mixes a load of rambling pseudo philosophical musings into a sprawling myriad of stories centered around Jean Valjean. 

No matter how much you love the musical, don’t try to read this on that alone. It’d be a bit like trying to read the bible because of an affinity for Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” 

And don’t read it for the second hand philosophy. It’s poorly done, and you could read the key works of Rousseau, Kant, and Voltaire in the time it takes to read this book. 

Read it because it’s so deeply imbued with love and sympathy for humankind. Hugo is a rare masterful student of human nature who looks hard, sees clearly, and finds a way to be charmed. 

The tenderness with which he handles the joys, pains, and motivations of his characters is stunning. He is sanctimonious about The Poor, but otherwise it’s one of the most complete and accurate expressions of the human experience. 

One star as political philosophy. Five stars as a story about people. Three stars.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Remarque shows in livid detail how bad war is for a soldier.

Synopsis:

I’m excited for war, but wait, actually it’s bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Miserable. Bad bad bad. Grotesque. Bad. Crippling. Bad. Bad. Bad. We eat a stolen goose! Bad. All my friends are dead.

It’s an unflinching rendition of what has since become a familiar pattern: wide eyed boy ships out eager and then discovers through extensive firsthand misery that death and pain flavor his war experience much more than glory and adventure.

But it’s mostly a one note symphony. It ignores that some moments might be exciting or meaningful (see War by Sebastian Junger) and it doesn’t plumb the emotional depths of its protagonist in interesting ways like Red Badge of Courage does. It runs its protagonist through a gauntlet of traumatic experiences and leaves the reader to imagine the resulting feelings.

More realistic than its ancestors? Yes. But not all it’s cracked up to be and since outpaced.

Three stars.