Los Miserables

Gracias Juan Valjean por demostrar que no todo esta perdido!!!

Frodundo e inigualable contenido emocional, fantástica prosa y expresión elocuente.

Les Mis is, to me, the best book I've ever read. It's full of the very best, and worst, of humanity. I can think of no other book that shows the whole range of mankind. The length may be a put off to some, but anyone who perseveres will be well rewarded and emerge better for having read this.

Fue lo mejor y más entretenido lo recomiendo. Y no recomiendo cualquier cosa.

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Am currently re-reading with my wife because we both loved it so much; Truly the best written novel of all time; Characters; story lines; heart ache; triumph and the use of the written word are beyond anything you can find from ANT writer today; truly the masterpiece by which all other writing should be measured against

Wow.. asombrosa obra de Arte. Ya no SE ven obras literarias asi.

Victor Hugo's editors wanted to remove copious amounts of text. I agree with them, but I won't recommend buying an abridged version, for what *I* think should go out is not necessarily what the translators took out. Read this book and skip the extraneous details; Hugo took scenic detours often throughout this work. That out of the way, this book was stunning, beautiful, and ultimately uplifting, a "take that!" on behalf of the human spirit. Jean Valjean's battle to let the angel on his shoulder get the better of the demon on the other shoulder (metaphorically; nothing so crass appears in the book) provides the pivots on which the story turns. This is a book meant to be re-read; I believe it will say something new with each reading, especially as the stages of your life change.

Long, hard to read. Very tough to get through for not much. Other ''classics'' have been much better.

I had high hopes for this book since I thoroughly enjoyed The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Unfortunately, the tendency to write chapters on obsolete details which is tedious at best in Hunchback is exponentially worse in Les Miserables. The story itself is amazing. The writing is eloquent and praiseworthy. However, the endless chapters on philosophy, or architecture, or, at one point, the monetary sense of using human excrement as fertilizer, had me wanting to bang my head against the wall. Nevertheless, I'm glad for once that I can never start a book without finishing it because the ending was so poignant and wonderful, though tragic, that I almost felt bad for hating the middle of the novel so much. I would have to say that my favorite character was Gavroche and therefore his death during the insurrection at the Rue de Chanvrerie was heartbreaking. In conclusion, I still regard Victor Hugo as a prominent and extremely talented writer but am going to forego any more of his novels for a while in favor of peace of mind.

One of the great novels of all time. I like the unabridged version best, by far.

Umm, so...as with War and Peace, how the heck do you review a novel that is part of the fabric of Western society; a book that has been around so long and was written by an author so esteemed as to have a reputation that proceeds the reading? Yeah, I don't know either.I will say that I assigned a one-star deduction (no, I am not the Russian judge, though I am definitely partial to Russian literature, but I digress) for two reasons: a) some of the commentary, while relevant to the plot, meandered longer than was interesting - in most cases - for my liking. This surprised me. I like reading history and observations of society, plus I am generally a curious cat. Somehow, Hugo wasn't holding my attention in a lot of the passages that were away from the main action of the story. Reason b) all of the coincidences used to advance the plot were hard to swallow. I will say that when I come across coincidences while I am reading fiction, it bugs the crap out of me. I mean really, really annoys me. Hugo, in using this device, managed to not wholly annoy me. So, The main story was kick-ass and in these sections I was hard pressed to put the book down. Unlike Tolstoy, in War and Peace, I was not so riveted during the other chapters of the story. Sigh. Since Hugo is awesome - apparently that is what is says on his headstone: "Awesome" - I will take the blame for having some fault during the reading of Les Misérables. I'm still not gonna give back that deducted start, though, Hugo!

There are so many beautiful and apt expressions and thoughts in this book, I will write them down as I read, or I won't remember them. I am only half way through this book so far. At times it is like reading poetry in prose."Success is a hideous thing. Its false similarity to merit deceives men.""The past has a face, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the face and tear off the mask.""Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanities inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. A shadow is hard to seize by the throat and dash to the ground.""Let us attack (the above phantoms), but let us distinguish. The characteristic of truth is never to run to excess. What need has she of exaggeration? Some things must be destroyed, and some things must be merely cleared up and investigated. What power there is in courteous and serious examination! Let us not carry flame where light alone will suffice."There are many more, but enough. Read the book. I've finished now, and it just may be the best book I've ever read.

Awasome book! This is one of the few books that actually made me cry.

I can't express the sensations this book provoked in me. I thought I had read good books until I found this one. Jean Valljean, Fantine, Cossette... They showed me the meaning of living and dying in this unfair but beautiful world.

Okay, I'll just put it out there - I didn't like Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I finished it this afternoon, I cheered - I was so very glad it was over. I found the whole thing to be mawkishly sentimental and utterly predictable. The characters contained virtually no shades of gray, and the narrator's continual need to digress - and digress - and digress - drove me bonkers.Here's the thing. The story itself could have probably been told in 300 pages or less. The other 1,162 pages were filled with the narrator's (Hugo's?) opinions about everything from the uselessness of convents, the history of riots in Paris, the greatness of the French people in general, the sanctity and purity of women and children, and even the worth of human excrement flowing through Paris's sewers. It seems as if Hugo decided that Les Miserables was his opportunity to discuss every fleeting idea or thought he'd ever had. In detail. With lots of name dropping. It drove this reader crazy.And the story itself. I expected a little more in a "classic." I don't know about anyone else, but I found myself predicting the outcome of almost every scene. And it was so cloying, so maudlin - a paragon of 19th century melodrama at its worst.So why am I giving Les Miserables 1.5 stars rather than one or even a half a star? 1. There were times when Hugo made me laugh. 2. Gavroche was a great character, finely drawn. 3. Because I read every one of its 1,463 pages.

This was a good story, but I made the mistake of reading the unabridged version, which contans endless tedious textbooky sections on French history, occupying easily as much space as the plot. There were good sections which may well have been cut from the abridged version, such as the 'sewage' chapter - an amusing eye-opener, and a chilling account of death by sinking sand. Otherwise it was a bit of a drag.I did shed a tear at the end, but there was relief, too, at having reached the end of this doorstopper.

I've just finished reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I read it once before, sometime between 18 and 20. I was absorbed in Jean Valjean's story from beginning to end, as well as in the stories of more minor characters, and perhaps half of the long digressions about economics, politics, the sewers of Paris, etc. ---Spoiler alert, although I don't really think the enjoyment of the book is based on not knowing the plot ---But, I find that I have to begin near the end, because I ended up feelings the books strongest effects there when Jean Valjean reveals to Marius, now Cosette's husband, that he had been in the galley. It was apparent earlier on that Valjean saw Cosette's love for someone else as the end of his relationship with him, and I was puzzled by this, and I didn't see why he needed to tell Marius. Jean Valjean's reasoning was that he didn't want someone unwillingly to be associated with someone like him if they didn't want to, and he didn't want to live a lie. But, at the same time I was emotionally struck by his sense of shame about what seemed so trivial, having stolen a loaf of bread, and doing it to feed his sister's children. For this he felt so low as to be below the lowest in society. It didn't seem to matter that he had also created a business that benefited a town, saved several lives, given to the poor, still he needed to shrink and hide. Perhaps I felt this more strongly because I currently have a friend in jail on a serious charge. Maybe it is just knowing all the ways throughout history in which people have been made to feel unworthy, untouchable for things which now make no sense to us, and, at the same time it continues for reasons that are similarly senseless. The other parts of the book that seem amazing to me are psychic struggles that occur within Jean Valjean - first when he has stolen the Bishops silver plates, and, on being brought back by the police, the bishop has said that he gave them to Valjean, and then brings out his candlesticks as well, telling Jean Valjean that he had forgotten them. Valjean has been hardened by his experience of 19 years in the galleys for stealing bread and then trying to escape, and the battle is whether to hold on to his bitterness or to allow himself to feel goodness. The next struggle is after he has established himself in a town, creating an enterprise which has enriched him as well as the town. But another man has been falsely identified as him and is about to be sent to the galleys for life for stealing apples, and another offense which Valjean had committed shortly after his release. So he struggles over whether he needs to turn himself in. In all these times his struggles were wrenching to me. These are common struggles - the process of change from a habitual way of feeling to one that allows more of life inside; the desire to shrink into the shadows. While some of his characters may be exagerated, perhaps Javert is in his dogged, unquestioning respect for authority, law and the upper class, the depiction of what Valjean struggles with in his own mind seems extremely realistic to me. in the Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple which is currently discussing the book, there are some comments about the depiction of women in a stereotyped way, even though most of this is done in what seem to be favorable statements about women, such as "One of the generosities of women is to yield." To me it makes no difference or little difference whether the stereotyped statements are positive or negative - it is always negative to impose a view that denies a person their full humanity and Hugo, to my eye, is definitely guilty of that. Toward the end I was beginning to feel that it was turning into a happily ever after story, with Cosette, who'd been an interesting enough kids, turning into this woman ready to submerge herself in her husband, and leave the room when he and her father had important things to discuss. Sure that was the view of the time, but then we appreciate Hugo for the ways in which he was able to see beyond his time, not for the ways he was limited by it.There was a lot too that was good about the depiction of the relationship between Marius and his grandfather, and his grandfather's treatment of Marius's father, though that got glossed over in the end. As I read the book I was amazed at times by just how much Hugo seemed to know about conditions and events around the world. I don't know exactly when Marx's ideas became popular, but, Hugo discussed economic ideas that were similar and the problems of creating and distributing wealth. He seemed very familiar with political events in the United States, and elsewhere. I don't know about other writers who wrote about the difficulties of poverty at that time. Dickens was about that time. E.Nesbitt and Frances Burnett were writers of children's books who wrote about poverty in England perhaps 50 years later. If I compare him to Dickens he seems to me both more realistic and not so confused about class. Thinking of Oliver Twist one difference is that Oliver who had the audacity to ask for more never does actually steal - and he turns out to be of gentile birth. While bringing attention to the misery of the poor he's depicted as being able to rise above it, seemingly as a characteristic of his class. Hugo's depiction of poverty is a bit less of a fairy tale. Fantine does sleep with someone without marrying, so she has some responsibility for her fate, unlike Oliver, but she is is not villified for that, or depicted as a person of bad character. Jean Valjean really did steal the bread, and having done that, and suffered out of proportion for it, acquires a character that includes some hardening against the world. I don't really have a summary for this discussion, except all in all it seems like a big and compassionate work. I liked it when I first read it and I still do.

Les Miserables is generally recognized as a ground-breaking work of fiction, a masterful and epic tale of social condemnation and individual redemption that serves as a foundation work in Western Culture. And, indeed, Les Mis itself has become a cottage industry, with its poor, miserable characters now gracing Broadway theatres, Loews cinemas and home theatre systems around the world. After reading Les Mis, I am convinced that it is indeed one of the most deservedly influential works in Western Literature. Hugo’s deep thoughts on the French revolution and its children have long challenged the imagination of middle school Parisians and untutored heartlanders struggling to follow a broadway score. His influence continues to be felt through stories that interweave historical fact and individual psychological turmoil, including such epic sagas as the Thorn Birds and the Forsyte Saga. Hugo simultaneously gives us insight into the society and culture, much as a good article in Newsweek might, and the kind of deep understanding of individual pathos I remember having upon first reading Freud when I was 15. It is a powerful combination. While other great works, works like Moby Dick or Paradise Lost, challenge the reader, assume some reasonable level of knowledge and intelligence, and urge the reader to stretch their world view, Hugo has the wisdom to write for the less literary, indeed, we might even say, less literate, and meticulously clarifies everything that has already been made clear, and then repeats it again, helping us to understand even the most trivial points in great detail. Indeed, one of the beauties of this book is that if you miss something the first time, you will likely be able to catch it the fourth time, and thus need not read too closely. It is as if Hugo has anticipated the entire genre of the modern daytime serial drama.In sum, Les Mis was everything I thought it would be, and deserves to be recognized as the groundbreaking, influential work it is, a work fully worthy of television serialization. Indeed, after completing it, I thought, "Wow! Now that's almost as good as the Epic of the Wheat!" High praise, indeed.

Les Miserables was a wonderful novel. The novel seemed to me to become a full circle in the end from when Jean Valjean was a convict to being a beloved hero who granted the love of his life, his daughter, what she previously had only shown him-love. It was a very passionate, real life story that touched millions including myself.

It exceeded my expectations. :))

What can I say about this mammoth novel, which has taken me longer to read than any other book of fiction while still reading at least some pages every day?It is a colossal, moving and colourful work, filled with some of the greatest figures in French literature. It has drama, pathos, love, hate, cruelty, duty, revolutionary excesses and aristocratic narrowmindedness. The features that for me prevent it being a total success are the lengthy digressions, covering Waterloo, argot, monastical conventions and even the history of sewers and the volume of excrement in Paris. These slow the story down and do become tiresome. The tiresome antics of the revolutionaries on the barricades also grated, they seeming to be more interested in the glamour rhetoric and glory of the act of defiance, rather than a genuine drive for social justice. These digressions at one point slowed me down to a point where I was reading barely half a dozen pages a day and I did almost give up on it at one point. But I knew I wanted to find out what happened to Valjean and Cosette and I am glad I did, sad though the ending was. A monumental work.

An absolutely and astoundingly amazing book, Victor Hugo paints a detailed masterpiece that encourages actual thought. It is impossible to relate the whole story - a simple attempt would take hours. All in all, it's about one person's desperate, miraculous life and all who touch or effect this gem. Read it every waking minute of every day.

Amazing. I know a lot of people read the abridged version to skip all the digressions about convents and sewer lines when really all you want to know is how Jean Valjean escapes, but I think you lose some of the experience by doing that. Yes, its long. Yes, I began to lost patience with the digressions by the end, but I also felt I understood not just the characters but also the world they lived in.

Well this is nothing but the French War and Peace, is what this is. And if it doesn't quite plumb the psychological depths of the human individual like Tolstoy's work does, it contains more, far more, of the real, common human life that we share. "Man is a depth still more profound than the people", says Jean Valjean, but that good old man is wrong, and this book is 1463 pages of passionate refutation.

The book I'd take with me to a desert island. A story of redemption, forgiveness and grace. No other translation compares to this.

Finally, I have defeated the behemoth. Les Misérables has been vanquished and will probably never again stray from my bookshelf. Which is a shame, because the story itself is really good, and Jean Valjean will go down in my personal literary history as one of my top ten characters. He's very well-written while also being almost completely admirable, which is somewhat rare. But Victor Hugo felt it necessary to give the complete history of every aspect of anything mentioned in his story. Something happens to one of the characters during the battle of Waterloo? Forty pages detailing the entire battle, but not in such a way that a person who doesn't already have a good grasp of Who's Who In The Napoleonic Wars can understand it. A character escapes through the Paris sewer system? Let's have a lengthy treatise on the history, advantages, and shortcomings thereof. Yes, OF THE SEWER SYSTEM. (not for reading while eating, that section). And then there were the discussions of all these little barricaded city uprisings in early 19th century Paris which I was supposed to already know about, but which I was basically just hearing about for the first time (thank you public school system), and let's not forget the pages of tribute to the city of Paris itself and all its beauties and uglinesses and street urchins, and all the pages devoted to discussions of royalists and how they felt about republicans and how everyone felt about Buonapartists, and all the allusions to Voltaire and Rousseau... all of which succeeded in making me feel like a complete idiot because I had only the faintest of faint ideas what they were talking about. All this extra stuff seriously dampened my enjoyment of what was otherwise a really, really superb book.I am reminded of a discussion on an author's weblog about how much the author should tell, and how much s/he should assume her readers will be able to figure out (the author in question had been accused of being overly subtle, since she runs little subtexts through her stories which are so well-hidden that almost nobody finds them). Hugo seemed to miss the boat completely on both sides of this issue. He assumed knowledge on his readers' part about the intricacies of French (and even more specifically, Parisian) government and customs in the early nineteenth century, while simultaneously feeling the need to go into far too much detail about nearly inconsequential side issues. If he'd made five or six books out of this one -- one ripping good yarn and several academic treatises on various subjects in which he was obviously quite interested and well-versed -- he'd have saved at least this reader a lot of frustration. For once there's a book for which a condensed treatment on film would be a blessing. I can't wait to see the movie of this one.

God, this book is depressing.

I have just finnished reading this and i have to say that out of all the classics I've read this is right up there with the best.To be honest, just to look at the door-stopper of a book is rather daunting, but once I got over the physical size of it, Les Miserables was immensely enjoyable.Despite the length I found it to be a real page-turner. The story is exciting and filled with characters that you can emotionally invest in and the length only helps to enhance this. The only part I found hard going was the retelling of the battle of Waterloo which was, perhaps, one detail too far. Many have critisized Hugo's diversions and the over emphasis on his own opinions and digressions but personally I found them mostly to be both a charming quirk as well as an essential componant towards the overall impact of the story by enabling me to imagine the context of the setting in the novel. After all a novel of such epic proportions deserves to have an epic span of topics, context and thought provoking content. Les Miserables is crammed with broad ranging subjects such as philiosophy, ethics, economy, history, religion, love of all kinds, politics, relationships, and all this is vocalised via the beautiful prose that enabled me to completely immerse myself in that world.Above all the one thing that will remain with me from reading Les miserables is the characters. Wonderfully drawn and each memorable in their own way, I was constantly on edge, anticipating how their individual stories would play out.Hugo's tale is gripping, emotional, and above all intensely human and therefore something, I think, everyone can relate to.

Where do I begin? Maybe I should start with this: I love epic novels. There are not many therapies quite as effective as books with the ability to transport you out of your problems and into fictional ones. This book came at just the right time; half of it was read during a tumultous two week period in which my family moved slightly abruptly; the second half was devoured last month, while I recovered from some unexpected goodbye's. I started Les Miserables with high expectations, and was not disappointed. Victor Hugo is champion of the touching moment. He will spend chapter after chapter setting up every tiny detail for the perfect moment. I found myself having to stop multiple times, I could read no more because I was crying too hard. Please do not be intimidated by this. The title is "The Miserable," and Hugo isn't afraid to bring you down to the level of the lowest to show you what must be the depths of despair. But woven into these troubles and woes are themes of hope and redemption. Thus, the tears and sorrow I felt were of the most satisfying variety. It was those sweet little moments that make this novel so great. Victor Hugo is not afraid of spending adequate time to set things up for a devestating paragraph or shocking sentence. Victor Hugo is certainly not concerned about wasting your time. For example - he spends over four chapters describing the history of the sewer systems of Paris. Was it really necessary? Maybe some of us enjoy having this random bit of history to share with our naughty nerd friends. I wasn't quite so enthusiastic. I attempted to immerse myself in the quality of his writing, and forgive the putrid subject matter. We must allow these great novel writers some lee-way in this area. They spend so much time and thought masking their genius behind characters and intricate story plots. The greatest epic novels tend to have the longest diversions; if we take advantage of the treasure they have handed us, we must also submit ourselves to the occasional ramble. And when you realize exactly how smart this man is, you shan't mind submitting yourself to a (maybe) unnecessary diatribe. So we plow through the history of Parisian sewers and find ourselves in a climax worthy of the highest accolades. For those of you worried about the time and stamina it takes to make it through a 1000+ page novel, have no fear. The book is constantly progressing, becoming more and more beautiful with each succuesive chapter. Before I finish this perhaps conservative and certainly not over-exaggerated praise, I must mention the characters. To me, the characters are the most important element of any novel or work of prose. Hugo's characters were interesting. Although a few bordered cliche, they each had their fair share of peculiarities and were (to some extent) relatable. They certainly had not the four dimensional reality of Tolstoy, neither were they the caricatures of Dickens. Hugo found a lovely middle ground. Although his characters are life-like, they also seem to embody themes, ideas, and philosophies that play and interact within the story - creating a suprisingly interesting philosophical thought box. Kudos to the man- for creating a novel that will outlive every rebellion and continue to reach the multitude with a message of the existence of undying love.