- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) [NOOK Book]
( 446 )
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
One of the most widely read novels of all time, Les Misérables was the crowning literary achievement of Victor Hugo’s stunning career. Though he was considered the greatest French writer of his day, Hugo was forced to flee the country because of his opposition to Napoleon III. While in exile he completed Les Misérables, an enormous melodrama set against the background of political upheaval in France following the rule of Napoleon I.
This newly abridged edition of Les Misérables tells the story of the peasant Jean Valjean—unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert. As Valjean struggles to redeem his past, we are thrust into the teeming underworld of Paris with all its poverty, ignorance, and suffering. Just as cruel tyranny threatens to extinguish the last vestiges of hope, rebellion sweeps over the land like wildfire, igniting a vast struggle for the democratic ideal in France.
A monumental classic dedicated to the oppressed, the underdog, the laborer, the rebel, the orphan, and the misunderstood, Les Misérables is a rich, emotional novel that captures nothing less than the entirety of life in nineteenth-century France.
Laurence M. Porter has published twelve books, including Victor Hugo (1999), and a hundred articles and chapters. He was a National Endowment for the Humanties Senior Fellow in 1998. He teaches French at Michigan State University, where he won the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1995.
In the 1820s and 1830s, Victor Hugo came into his own as a writer and figurehead of the new Romanticism, a movement that sought to liberate literature from its stultifying classical influences. His 1827 preface to the play Cromwell proclaimed a new aesthetic inspired by Shakespeare, based on the shock effects of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sublime. The great success of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) confirmed Hugo's primacy among the Romantics.
By 1830 the Hugos had four children. Exhausted from her pregnancies and her husband's insatiable sexual demands, Adèle began to sleep alone, and soon fell in love with Hugo's best friend, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. They began an affair. The Hugos stayed together as friends, and in 1833 Hugo met the actress Juliette Drouet, who would remain his primary mistress until her death 50 years later.
Personal tragedy pursued Hugo relentlessly. His jealous brother Eugène went permanently insane following Victor's wedding to Adèle. His daughter, Léopoldine, together with her unborn child and her devoted husband, died at 19 in a boating accident on the Seine. Hugo never fully recovered from this loss.
Political ups and downs ensued as well, following the shift of Hugo's early royalist sympathies toward liberalism during the late 1820s. He first held political office in 1843, and as he became more engaged in France's social troubles, he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly following the February Revolution of 1848. After Napoléon III's coup d'état in 1851, Hugo's open opposition created hostilities that ended in his flight abroad from the new government.
Declining at least two offers of amnesty -- which would have meant curtailing his opposition to the Empire -- Hugo remained in exile in the Channel Islands for 19 years, until the fall of Napoléon III in 1870. Meanwhile, the seclusion of the islands enabled Hugo to write some of his most famous verse as well as Les Misérables (1862). When he returned to Paris, the country hailed him as a hero. Hugo then weathered, within a brief period, the siege of Paris, the institutionalization of his daughter Adèle for insanity, and the death of his two sons. Despite this personal anguish, the aging author remained committed to political change. He became an internationally revered figure who helped to preserve and shape the Third Republic and democracy in France. Hugo's death on May 22, 1885, generated intense national mourning; more than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried.
Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Hugo owned a pet cat named Gavroche -- the name of one of the primary characters in Les Misérables.
The longest sentence ever written in literature is in Les Misérables; depending on the translation, it consists of about 800 words.
When Hugo published Les Misérables, he was on holiday. After not hearing anything about its reception for a few days, Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher, reading, simply:
"?"
The complete reply from the publisher:
"!"
From Laurence Porter's Introduction to Les Miserables
The Great French Novel
Why do we still read Les Misérables? Not too many years ago, it was added to the required reading list for the agrégation in French literature, the competitive state examination that qualifies teachers at advanced levels. Its moral, social, and political messages remain pertinent to many of the situations we confront. But above all, Les Misérables is the unrecognized Great French Novel,” analogous to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I do not mean that it is necessarily the greatest French novel: one might prefer Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, just as in the literature of other languages, one might prefer Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s The Trial, or Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. The social, moral, and intellectual range of Hugo’s characters far exceeds what we find in all these other great authors, whose social density is nonetheless noteworthy. Beyond that impressive achievement, Les Misérables in many respects conforms to an ideal type, an influential theoretical entity whose traits are realized only in part by any concrete example.
The Great National Novel is capacious: it covers substantial amounts of time and space. It contains many vivid characters belonging to varied social conditions: it is not intimist in its setting, not a drawing-room adventure limited to family, friends, and courtship. It tells its sprawling story in a traditional mode, dominated by the controlling perspective of an omniscient author who, despite flashbacks and digressions, generally proceeds steadily forward, following the protagonists as they age. It usually deploys la grande histoire (big” history, revolutions and wars) in the background, although the main characters, affected as they are by political dramas, usually are not leading players in them. It implies some connection between individual and national destinies. By the time he wrote Les Misérables, Hugo had had more direct political experience at the highest levels of government than had many other writers of his time. Very often the Great National Novel suggests the looming presence of the supernatural, hidden but at times glimpsed behind the scenes, or during second states” of consciousness such as dreams, drug experiences, visions, hallucinations, illness, passion, or prayer. Hugo began writing Les Misérables shortly after spending several years of evenings at mystical séances, and after elaborating the religious system, based on punitive and redemptive reincarnation, that he finally made explicit in his visionary poem La Fin de Satan. The Great National Novel usually relegates artistic self-consciousness to the background: it does not become a Künstlerroman—the portrait of the artist as a young man—nor does it foreground the cleverness of the writer’s craft by radical experiments in point of view, plot structure, stylistic innovations, or characterization. Instead, the Great National Novel quietly insinuates the mature author’s hard-won wisdom through a series of aphorisms, or pithy, penetrating generalizations about human nature. These maxims demonstrate the author’s ability to synthesize many experiences. The digressions are miniature essays on varied subjects—authors of the Great National Novel are born essayists and amateur philosophers—that aim to instruct the audience. In contrast to the Self-Conscious Novel (Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot), digressions do not serve to tease the expectant reader by delaying the forward progress of the story, but to establish the writer’s authority as a portraitist of a wide world by giving glimpses into his or her encyclopedic knowledge.
The Influence of Les Misérables
In the late nineteenth century, Les Misérables anticipated both the naturalistic movement and its opposite pole, the Catholic Renaissance. Whereas the realistic novel typically deals with the middle class, Naturalism deals with the working class and with the underworld. Repetitious, menial labor is difficult to dramatize in a novel; but Hugo devotes ample space to describing members of the working class at play (Fantine and her friends), and the criminal class at work or trying to escape from the police. In the Paris scenes, he depicts the grisettes (young proletarian women who wore gray smocks at their jobs, and who were stereotypically easy targets for seduction). Notably in the chapter L’Année 1817,” he emphasizes the inequities of their sexual exploitation by middle-class men in a direct way that Zola, with his sexual insecurities, could not (compare Zola’s Nana, 1880, depicting female sexuality as a monstrous source of social corruption). Hugo has not yet received due credit for anticipating the naturalist movement in the chapters devoted to Fantine’s life both in Paris and in her hometown.
The Catholic Renaissance, which deplored Hugo’s bombastic, prophetic rhetoric and his pretensions to revealing a new religion, also derived considerable indirect inspiration from Hugo. Like Claudel, who detested him and made a point of saying so, like Mauriac, or like Bernanos, from thirty to ninety years after him, Hugo in 1862 dramatizes his heroes’ relentless pursuit by conscience, meaning our instinctive awareness of God.
Hugo’s appeal to posterity depends not only on the awe-inspiring range and depth of his masterpiece, Les Misérables, not only on his inspiring, idealistic visions of political and social progress, but also on the acute visual sense that put him well ahead of his time, but that can be captured and reinforced by modern media such as film and television. His extraordinary visual imagination is both impressionistic—sensitive to colors, including colored shadows, and to changes in light—and cinematic, aware of varying angles of vision and shifting vantage points. It involves an exceptional responsiveness to both light and motion. One can find striking proof of this in Hugo’s correspondence. He does not write interesting letters; he wrote letters while resting from his continuous periods of creative work on most days, on his feet in front of his writing stand from 5 a.m. to noon, with a cup of hot chocolate nearby. In letters, he cares more about making contact with others than about thinking of precisely what he has to say. But the one interesting letter in the first volume of his correspondence describes his first ride on a train, and his fascination with how the landscape blurs and flickers as he passes it at speeds far greater than he had ever experienced before. Compare the description of what Jean Valjean sees on his carriage ride to denounce himself at the court in Arras. Notre-Dame de Paris provides even better examples. Hugo anticipates Claude Monet’s famous series of paintings of the same subject when he evokes the changing light on the façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Following this passage, he executes the verbal equivalent of a zoom-in shot to approach a balcony on which an engagement party has gathered. Earlier, the description circling Paris from the top of the cathedral towers (A Bird’s-Eye View of Paris”) anticipates the cinematic technique of the traveling shot. At the beginning of the twentieth century, polls rated Hugo as the greatest nineteenth-century French poet, but his gifts as a storyteller in his plays and novels were fully acknowledged on an international scale only when Les Misérables was produced as the first full-length feature film in France in 1909; within a few years Albert Capellani of Pathé and André Antoine of Le Théâtre-Libre produced a noteworthy series of silent films of Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), the play Marie Tudor (1912), and the novels Quatrevingt-treize (1914) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918). Lon Chaney’s celebrated performance as Quasimodo in W. Worsley’s film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame de Paris (1924) consolidated these triumphs. More recently, television versions of the plays Les Burgraves (1968) and Torquemada (1976) were triumphs. Today (November 2002), Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s stage version of Les Misérables (1980), inspired by the rock opera Jesus-Christ Superstar, is still running in New York and on tour in the United States. It eclipsed the record number of international productions of a musical, previously held by Cats (see Porter, Victor Hugo, pp. 152156).
KateBrianIsAwesome
Posted July 22, 2009
I Also Recommend:
The unabridged version is what you should read. That's what the author Victor Hugo wanted us to read. He did not write 1463 pages for people to butcher it up to an abridged version. And with the abridged version you don't fully get the affect of the book. I know people don't have a very good attention span these days but it's so worth it to read the unabridged version. The abridged version takes alot of important parts out. If you are in a hurry and need a quick read for school or something like that get the spark notes or cliff notes. Please show the author respect by reading the unbutchered version. I'm dissappointed in BN for publishing the abridged version. Les Miserables is one of the most greatest books on the world. Don't let the size of the book discourage you. When you look at it like this some of us read 1000 some pages a month when we add up all the books we've read.
15 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted December 28, 1999
This book is truly a masterpiece. The reader is absolutely drawn in by the characters. I adore books that make me cry because I know that then, I am definately involved. For this book, I bawled! I have to warn you that I have read a couple of different abridged versions and some of them cut out really crucial parts. Play it safe, pick up the unabridged version! You'll love it!
10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted November 4, 2008
I've read both the unabridged version and this abridged version. This version summarizes parts of the book where Hugo gets a bit long winded and spends several pages just to make one point that could easily be made by one paragraph. I prefer this version.
Hugo's Jean Valjean will have you sharing his feelings as society both praises and condemns him. Society praises his accomplishments yet can condemn him for past mistakes and for which overrule anything he did or could have done to better himself and those around him. While reading this novel I often wonder how close to the truth this treatment was. I suspect, very close.
6 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.7129817
Posted March 28, 2011
I love this book, but I was not at all satisfied with the Nook version. It worked fine at first, but then it would freeze up on me. I would constantly get error messages saying the Activity Reader has stopped working, and then I would have to force close it. Then to top it all off, the last part of the book is missing! Not worth wasting your $ ... even if it's only a dollar.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted September 26, 2008
I loved this book. It is skillfully written and truly a classic. I would recommend reading the full version, not the abridged because there is a lot that you miss. A wonderful book full of action and love. It is now my favorite book ever!
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Booklover154
Posted May 9, 2011
The very ending of the book is missing. It starts freezing towards the end. Loved the story and so upset I couldn't finish it.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 5, 2011
I have spent nearly two hours with customer service because my nook freezes up whenever I try to something unusual like highlight a portion, look up a word, or turn the page. Also got the Activity Reader Error. Final engineering report: we will refund your money. I will purchase another version, but still unabridged as the story is wonderful.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 11, 2008
This is my favorite book of all time. It is filled with great characters that one would sincerily care about, and has an unforgettable, yet sometimes misunderstood hero. I VERY highly recommend this book to all!!
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted March 17, 2011
This is truly a classic. But why pay even $0.99 when you can get it for free at Project Gutenberg????
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted November 16, 2008
I'm not sure how this excruciatingly long-winded book managed to achieve classic status. The characters are completely flat, from the relentlessly selfless Bishop of Digne to the reformed Jean Valjean who, though he sometimes doubts himself, always winds up being utterly generous and humble, to Thenardier, the caricature of bottomless greed, and Javert the relentless inspector who instead of pursuing murderers, rapists and con-artists, inexplicably spends ten years obsessing over the capture of a guy who stole a loaf of bread and wouldn't give a kid back a coin that he'd dropped.
For all its flowery prose, this book doesn't manage to bring much of anything to life. We're told that Jean Valjean has this timeless love for adopted little Cosette, but we never get to see that love develop. We never see any tender and inspirational moments between them. The author just insists that it's an amazing love and we are supposed to take his word for it. Likewise the romance between Cosette and Marius. Not much of anything happens between them. There is never a moment when they are together and we feel like we're seeing two people discover the elements of love buried beneath their outward surfaces. Here everything is surface. VH insists that their love is great; we watch them pining away for each other; but really we wonder why exactly they're pining.
As for the famous digressions in the book, they aren't the problem. Okay--four chapters on the sewers of Paris and the poetics of excrement were a bit much, but the real problem is that Hugo endlessly repeats himself. It seems like he doesn't think the reader is smart enough to appreciate the sense of what he's saying unless he repeats it three or four or five times. At one point, I put the book down in disgust because he posed the same philosophical question (with slight rewording each time) over and over again till it filled up most of a page. If you read this book, be prepared to mutter under your breath "All right, I get it already...could you move on please" quite frequently.
I've read some reviews that cite this book as a good lesson in the history of the French Revolution. It's not actually about THE French Revolution, just an uprising in Paris more than forty years later, though echoes of the Revolution and its aftermath are everywhere. Unfortunately for the modern non-French reader, Hugo pretty much assumes you already know everything about the Revolution, the Restoration, the reign of Napoleon and lots of more obscure tidbits of French history. He doesn't often explain, but only rhapsodizes on bygone days so that, if you aren't already steeped in French history, you often have to resort to an online encyclopedia to find out what it is he's actually talking about.
Speaking of not being a French reader, will someone please tell the idiot translators of these kinds of books that they need to translate everything into English. There are untranslated French and Latin phrases sprinkled throughout every chapter. I realize they may not have an exact equivalent in English, but I could at least get a sense of them if they were translated. Leaving them in French or Latin just leaves me with a bunch of words I have to translate myself.
2 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted August 16, 2008
As if anyone needed an excuse to read Les Miserables--one of the most fantastic pieces of literature of all time--we now have a wonderfully rendered translation by Julie Rose. Coupled with a wildly intelligent introduction by Adam Gopnik, this is the most complete and informative edition of Hugo's masterpiece to date. With ludicrously complete endnotes, one can read the novel and achieve near total comprehension of the era about which Hugo was writing. We understand through this winning translation and notes why Napoleon was good and evil, why he was such a polarizing figure, why the French Revolution was so important to European and world history. Understanding the world from which Hugo's charaters come helps us relate and identify with them even more. We understand why Enjolras is a zealot, why Javert is dedicated beyond reason to the law, why Fantine felt she had run out of options, to name a very few. Les Miserables, at its core, is a meditation on the human spirit in its idealized form: what Man can achieve through good deeds, dedication, and love of his fellow men. Read and be inspired.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 23, 2011
I think this book is inspiring and touching but this version seems to not work. Read the book though.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Joethereader
Posted July 16, 2011
Huge, wide-ranging story, including a lot of French history of the era. Much of it is obscure to me with "insider" references, but the classic aspects of this great work are apparent. The translation is dated, but quite readable, particularly with the dictionary feature of the Nook.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 8, 2011
The story of Les Mis is absolutely wonderful. I was drawn to reading the book after seeing the 25th Anniversary production of the musical at the O2 in London (also highly recommended). I like that in the unabridged version, you get more details about the story, but you also get extensive social commentary from Hugo on the world he sees around him. It adds another dimension to the book. That having been said, this particular file works great until you get to 700 out of the 1250 pages. From that point on it continually freezes everytime you try to turn a page. It also frequently kicks you to an entirely different page which may be numerous pages back from where you are currently reading or several chapters ahead.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.tst63
Posted March 21, 2011
Although I am somewhat familiar with this story through theater, I wanted to see how much more the book went in detail, etc., but the sample will not open. BUY WITH CAUTION.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted March 16, 2011
This book is great. I don't know about the sample, but I bought the real deal. I downloaded it and its great. This is a rather large book so it definitely took longer than normal to download. Probably the other users problems. Highly recommended!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Rowsdower42
Posted January 10, 2011
I really enjoyed this book so much for the fact that it was challenging! I usually only read books that were "fun" or "enjoyable" for me, but this was the first real book that actually tested my mind! The wording in this book is totally different (probably because it was written by someone who is french), but it changes the way you think and understand what the story is about. I cannot even count how many new words I came across! It helped me practice my reading skills and enhanced my ability to think about and understand different types of writing.
This book is not only for the challenge, it is also for the enjoyment. I honestly thought that I would not like it at all, but as I started to get into it, I was hooked. This author really goes into detail of all of the character's emotions, and various opinions about certain problems. It really makes you understand what the main characters are going through, and you almost feel that you are with them, feeling those same emotions. This book really shows the true meaning of love towards father and child. This author really opened my eyes to how the main character (Jean Valjean) will do anything to take care of her, and nothing more. It would be very easy for him to escape and go off by himself, but he truly respects the law, but also knows that she (Cosette) cannot live in the state she was first in, (being a slave). he therefore dedicates his life into taking care and raising her up until she can take care of herself, so then he can settle his deal with justice. I really admired this character, and loved all of the detailed feelings he had for this little girl, which truly touched my heart.
I would defiantly recommend this book to people (around ages 15+) who want a challenging book, and are wanting to put their mind to the test. It is such an amazing book with challenging words and names that are hard to tell apart, but that was the fun of it for me! :)
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I keep missing parts of the book. This is no good for someone who already loves great literature and is trying to re-read.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted February 8, 2008
Oh, quel bon livre! I picked up Les Misérables because it was French, and it filled me with the pain of Fantine, the innocence of Cosette, the reform of Jean Valjean, and the valor of Marius. When I finally got to the last page I didn't want to be there. It was as if I'd known the characters for years. The book constantly surprised me and even caused me to exclaim aloud a few times, which is highly unusual for me. Don't be daunted by this book's size. It is intimidating, but once you get into the intricately weaved story, you'll never forget it.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted January 22, 2012
This book was good overall but ther are some parts in the story that are boring and can be skipped
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
LendMe™
![Les Miserables [Illustrated]](http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/120020000/120027073.GIF)
Overview
Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.One of the ...