The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

VICTOR HUGO is scarcely the only great poet to have indulged himself in the composition of novels. One thinks of Alessandro Manzoni, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. George Eliot, Willa Cather, James Joyce, and Ursula Le Guin, particularly the latter, wrote some admirable poems, but it is their novels that we reread.

I am content with Paul Valéry's judgment that Victor Hugo was the titan among all French poets. Though I am obsessed with Les Misérables, it is not of the company of Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert at their best. Is it actually a novel? A vast extravaganza that never knows where to stop, it sprawls over a mass of materials that are irrelevant to the story that supposedly it tells. I have read it straight through only once in the original, and was both exalted and baffled. There is an admirable translation by Norman Denny (1976), now available in Penguin Classics, which performs the necessary task of relegating to appendices Victor Hugo's extraordinary excursions into the idea of the convent and into the Parisian argot of the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in the criminal class. Denny chooses to print all of the detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo that constitutes the initial section of Part Two: Cosette. Only Chapter XIX is in any way crucial to the story, since it recounts the involuntary rescue of Colonel Pontmercy from the battlefield by the scavenger Thénardier. Colonel Pontmercy is the father of Marius, who is intended by Victor Hugo to be the hero of Les Misérables. Unfortunately, the two least persuasive characters in this vast book are Marius and his beloved Cosette, the child of the unfortunate Fantine, who has supported her by a miserable life as a prostitute and dies very early. Cosette is then rescued from the Thénardier family that starves her by the heroic protagonist Jean Valjean, who in most regards is the book.