The characters in Les Mis are sad

Last week, the Paris Review posted this wonderful mood index chart for the characters of Les Misérables, or Les Miz. Be impressed when you look at it. Someone has gone to ridiculously unnecessary lengths of trouble to chronicle every happy (blue) and sad (red) occurrence from Victor Hugo’s behemoth of a novel, very ably reducing literature to something resembling scanner frequency readings. 
Why is this important? For one, it shows just how adept we have become at reducing imposing books into nothing more than fact and mood. If you get Hugo’s basic plot and the attitude of his characters (our lovely mood index chart will tell you that most of them are sad), there’s not much reason to wade through his hundreds and hundreds of pages of detail and French history.
Or so most people would have you believe. Unfortunately for Les Miz, it has gone through this sparkchart — cutting more often than any other book (58 film adaptations to date, to say nothing of the TV serials). When it does emerge from the cutting board and onto the big screen (or stage), what viewers get is a cute love triangle, lots of angry young men, and a tidy end to the struggles of this man with a funny French name, all of it packed into a dainty two or so hours.
This isn’t the work that Hugo wrote. Les Miz is a revolution across a thousand pages. It’s a saga of man’s undying spirit. It’s two dozen lives that rot and fester until either God or the merciful bullet ends them. And it’s exhausting because 19th-century France had never heard of a line editor. Monsieur Hugo dispenses pages of detail as though he were throwing candy off a parade float.
However, simply doing away with those pages of detail, as most translators will, is no way to read Les Misérables. Those pages are what give the novel its difficulty and exhaustion. Without them, the reader would feel like a mere spectator watching the ‘miserable’ toil but doing none of the toiling herself. Hugo’s works are all give-and-take relationships. Reading them should feel like a workout: devote your energies now to exhaustive and often repetitive exercises, and in the end you’ll have grown exponentially, though you may not feel it all at once.
How we’ve managed to boil all of this into a pop opera and dreamt dreams I’ll never know.
But far be it for me to totally lambast the efforts of Les Miz’s adaptors. The musical by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg continues to mar my iPod’s Top 25 Most Played playlist and Tom Hooper’s recent adaption was nothing short of a masterpiece. Even so, it may be a masterpiece, but not the Les Miz I read.
All things considered, a mood index chart may be one of the better ways of condensing Les Miz. For my part, I prefer the words of Hugo himself. Shortly after the book was released in England, the novelist, eager to hear how the novel was being received, telegraphed his publisher a single letter:
“?”
His response?
“!”
Why is this important? For one, it shows just how adept we have become at reducing imposing books into nothing more than fact and mood. If you get Hugo’s basic plot and the attitude of his characters (our lovely mood index chart will tell you that most of them are sad), there’s not much reason to wade through his hundreds and hundreds of pages of detail and French history.
Or so most people would have you believe. Unfortunately for Les Miz, it has gone through this sparkchart — cutting more often than any other book (58 film adaptations to date, to say nothing of the TV serials). When it does emerge from the cutting board and onto the big screen (or stage), what viewers get is a cute love triangle, lots of angry young men, and a tidy end to the struggles of this man with a funny French name, all of it packed into a dainty two or so hours.
This isn’t the work that Hugo wrote. Les Miz is a revolution across a thousand pages. It’s a saga of man’s undying spirit. It’s two dozen lives that rot and fester until either God or the merciful bullet ends them. And it’s exhausting because 19th-century France had never heard of a line editor. Monsieur Hugo dispenses pages of detail as though he were throwing candy off a parade float.
However, simply doing away with those pages of detail, as most translators will, is no way to read Les Misérables. Those pages are what give the novel its difficulty and exhaustion. Without them, the reader would feel like a mere spectator watching the ‘miserable’ toil but doing none of the toiling herself. Hugo’s works are all give-and-take relationships. Reading them should feel like a workout: devote your energies now to exhaustive and often repetitive exercises, and in the end you’ll have grown exponentially, though you may not feel it all at once.
How we’ve managed to boil all of this into a pop opera and dreamt dreams I’ll never know.
But far be it for me to totally lambast the efforts of Les Miz’s adaptors. The musical by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg continues to mar my iPod’s Top 25 Most Played playlist and Tom Hooper’s recent adaption was nothing short of a masterpiece. Even so, it may be a masterpiece, but not the Les Miz I read.
All things considered, a mood index chart may be one of the better ways of condensing Les Miz. For my part, I prefer the words of Hugo himself. Shortly after the book was released in England, the novelist, eager to hear how the novel was being received, telegraphed his publisher a single letter:
“?”
His response?
“!”