Les Mis finished!

Left: Victor Hugo

I just finished Les Miserables, 1260 pages in the Modern Library translation by Charles Wilbour.  If anyone has read the new translation published by the Vintage Classics, please comment.  I’d like to compare translations, because I’ve read that Wilbour’s was hurried.

I confess, after the death of Javert, I felt less motivated to read the remaining 100 pages.  So I speed read them.

You got to give me credit: I read all four chapters on the sewers of Paris.  Hugo, the patriot, wrote that the waste of the French was the best waste in the world.  I’m certainly glad to know that!

My guess is, however, that the sewers of Paris symbolize all the people discarded by society as waste, and other things as well.

The final 100 pages also reveal Hugo’s genius level insight into human nature (like the 1100 pages before them). Jean Valjean could not be free until he reconciled his own self-image as a convict with the reality of his saintly life.  Rejection by his son-in-law Marius paralleled his own self-rejection.

I recall a young Korean woman whom we met in Texas.  She had been rescued from a tormented life by a loving G.I. who married her and brought her to the States.  But she couldn’t accept his love or a happy life, because the scars of her suffering remained unhealed within.

Just as Javert could not accept Valjean’s transformation, Valjean himself could not— until he found acceptance in the hearts and the eyes of those he loved.

The incarnation means, I think, that God does many things through human beings.  When we accept people who feel unacceptable then they begin to feel accepted.  And by the way so do we.

More as I have the chance to reflect.