|
Less Misery
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
“The classic story of the triumph of grace and redemption, adapted for today’s readers” by Jim Reimann
W Publishing, 2001. 288 pages.
Many years ago my mother received in the mail, every month or so, a volume of the “Readers’ Digest Condensed Books” series. Each volume contained abridgments of recent books. I never quite grasped, back then, the reasoning by which one might justify reading a shortened version of a longer work. Jim Reimann’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s monumental Les Misérables fails to put to rest those childhood doubts that I have carried into adulthood.
In a brief introduction, Reimann offers something of a rationale for his adaptation. In his view, Hugo’s novel is one that should be read by many people, but “due to its great length and to language that has become increasingly difficult to understand over time, few people in our current generation have endeavored to read it.” A moment later, though, Reimann asserts that Les Misérables is a “masterpiece” with a “writing style virtually unmatched by today’s writers.” Despite its beauty, he goes on, “much of the main storyline gets lost among its many tedious portions.” Tedium, for Reimann, includes Hugo’s entire detailed introduction of the Bishop of Digne, significant development of characters such as Fantine, his fascinating digressions, such as that on the Paris sewer system (which adds inestimable import to Jean Valjean’s flight through the sewers), and many other elements that make Les Misérables a panorama of France in the early 1800s.
Reimann then implies that Hugo was long-winded for the sake of money: “Many of the classical writers of Hugo’s day were paid by the word, which often made them more verbose than they might otherwise have been.” While it is true that Hugo was handsomely paid for Les Misérables, he was not paid by the word; nor was the book written in serial fashion à la many of Charles Dickens’ novels. Les Misérables is long because its author’s broad intentions required massive space in which to be carried out. Verbosity and a “virtually unmatched” writing style would seem to be strange bedfellows in any case.
It goes without saying that Les Misérables is a challenging read. More than 1,200 pages and a plethora of digressions from the central characters and plots may tax some of “today’s readers,” but those who stay with it are treated to a literary experience that is difficult to surpass. Reimann insists that his adaptation tells the “real story” of Les Misérables -- “the story of Jean Valjean and the power of grace to redeem a life and to totally transform it.” But as Hugo biographer Graham Robb points out, Hugo himself provided many clues, via pre-publication press releases, as to the “real” nature of the book:
Long before it came out, everyone knew that Les Misérables was not just a novel, it was “the social and historical drama of the nineteenth century,” “a vast mirror reflecting the human race, captured on a given day of its enormous existence”; “Dante made a hell with poetry; I have tried to make one with reality.”
Graham Robb offers Robert Louis Stevenson’s assessment of the novel’s power:
The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable . . . The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels.
Commenting on Stevenson’s observation, Robb might well be critiquing Reimann’s Les Misérables:
This is the touchstone of all adaptations of Les Misérables, musical or cinematic: to turn Javert, the tenacious respecter of authority, “that savage in the service of civilization,” into the villain of the piece is to deprive the novel of its dynamite, to point the finger at a single policeman instead of at the system he serves.
A singular story of one man’s redemption Les Misérables is not. The redemption of Jean Valjean is one aspect of the novel; it is what societal systems do with this redeemed man that make up most of Victor Hugo’s palette. Reimann’s Les Misérables robs the novel of the plurality that is clearly indicated for all to see in Hugo’s title. His version, lacking a sense of Hugo’s scope, would more accurately be called Le Misérable.
Reimann has also “attempted to maintain the beautiful pictures that Victor Hugo masterfully painted with the words of his day -- but in a way that today’s readers can better understand.” Despite this attempt, Reimann’s Les Misérables reads like a plot summary, and where Hugo paints in a rich chiaroscuro, Reimann is bland and washed out. Lapses into overly-contemporary language are jarring and inexcusable: “[Marius] discovered by standing on his dresser that he could see straight through to the Jondrette’s room. His curiosity overwhelmed him at this point, and he began to rationalize that it was okay to gaze at misfortune if his goal was to relieve it.” Reimann’s attempt to echo Hugo’s style was, I have no doubt, honest; he seems, however, not to be up to the task.
“Today’s readers” are capable of reading Victor Hugo’s classic in its entirety in any of the legitimate translations available. Their effort will be rewarded by fully realized portraits of Jean Valjean, Javert, Cosette, Thenardier, and Marius, as well as of important characters Reimann inadequately acknowledges: Bishop Myriel, Fantine, Éponine, and Gavroche, to name a few. Rather than settle for a tale of one man’s salvation, readers should strive to experience the novel’s full scope as a “social and historical drama” and a “vast mirror” of the human race, of societal norms that may very well be beyond redemption.
[Editor’s note: Victor Hugo: A Biography by Graham Robb (1997) is published by W. W. Norton and Company.]
|
