Re-Reading Les Misérables

Manga, Manga, Duck

2023-05-26T00:00:00Z

Oops! Here we are, May almost over, and I still haven’t gotten around to writing up a review of the first omnibus of Takahiro Arai’s manga adaptation of Les Misérables, and I just discovered that the second one is already out! I’m going to pick that up and pre-order the third (July 25) and fourth (December 5) volumes now before I forget, and make a point to review the first two before Barricade Day! [Update (June 5): so much for that plan. I bought volume two but I haven’t read it yet.] That should complete the story: Four English-language omnibus editions, each collecting two of the original Japanese volumes.

While I was looking those up, I found another surprise: Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck in Les Misérables and War and Peace. Yeah, I did a double-take. Italian comic book artist Giovan Battista Carpi, known for his extensive work on Donald Duck comics for Disney, drew dozens of literary parodies with Donald, Daisy, Uncle Scrooge and the rest from 1960 through 1989. And Fantagraphics is reprinting them (presumably in English). This volume is scheduled to be out on August 29:

It’s Victor Hugo… duckified! When French gendarme Javert thinks that poor Jean McJean (Scrooge McDuck) stole two candlesticks, he swears to run him down–even years later, when McJean has become town mayor and guardian of Daisette (Daisy Duck). Are the candlesticks the key to a fabulous treasure lost in Paris? And do the freres Beagle and Peg Leg Thénardier want it? (Silly question!)

I’m going to have to pick this up too, aren’t I? (Also a silly question!)

Interesting Links

2023-03-10T00:00:00Z

Sites

The Les Misérables Reading Companion - a fantastic podcast by Briana Lewis, Associate Professor of French at Allegheny College, who goes through the novel and brings to light context, connections, double meanings and more. Perfect to listen to between reading sessions as you make your way through the book!

Articles

What I learned about the pandemic and civil unrest from reading ‘Les Miserables’ - Nicholas Goldberg at The Los Angeles Times, Feb 14 2021. I definitely had similar thoughts over the course of 2020–2021.

That was the year a virulent epidemic swept through Europe, arriving in Paris in March. Three months later in June, inspired by the rising death count, economic distress and anti-monarchist sentiment aimed at King Louis Philippe, unrest erupted on the streets.

This Book Will Change Your Life - Kaila Hale-Stern at The Mary Sue, June 30, 2017.

Let Them Eat Bread: The Theft That Helped Inspire ‘Les Miserables’ - Nina Martyris on NPR’s The Salt, March 20, 2017.

Visuals

Bienvenue a Hauteville House - a virtual tour of the house Victor Hugo lived in on Guernsey, where he wrote most of Les Misérables. (via LMRC)

Paris street in the June Days Uprising, 1848 - Historic photo colorized by Marina Amaral.

Early photos of Notre Dame - Twitter thread by Marina Amaral (@marinamaral2) showing early 1800s photos of the cathedral as Hugo would have known it, before the spire was added in 1859.

Javert, I found him! - Photo of, well, take a look. @GarrettZink

Detweeting

2023-01-15T00:00:00Z

I’m retiring the @ReadingLesMis Twitter account. It’s been a long run, but social media has changed dramatically since 2013. It’s been 5 years since my last read-through, and even if I pick it up again, I don’t anticipate doing the play-by-play posting I used to. And even if I did, Twitter’s new ownership has been…haphazard at best, so I don’t think that would be the place for it.

The blog isn’t going away. I plan on reviewing the first volume of the manga soon. You can follow the blog’s feed if you use Feedly or NetNewsWire or another feed reader.

I’m also still on the Fediverse at @kelson@notes.kvibber.com (powered by GoToSocial, which is interoperable with Mastodon), on Bookwyrm at @KelsonReads@bookwyrm.social, and reviewing other books here on my website.

And of course my main blog (which this project spun out of!) is still going.

Comics Lost and Found

2022-12-02T00:00:00Z

All I wanted to do was update a couple of broken links.

The ComiXology store pages for the Manga Classics and Classics Illustrated comic adaptations had both gone missing. I figured they were casualties of Amazon finally absorbing the last remnants of ComiXology into Kindle.

It was easy enough to find a new link for the Manga Classics eBook, and I added a link to the publisher while I was at it.

But the entire Classics Illustrated line? Nowhere to be found, at least not digitally. Amazon had print copies of just about everything, some used back issues and some more recent printings. Barnes & Noble had a whole lot of books with “classics” and “illustrated” their descriptions, but the handful I found from this line were only print. Kobo (all digital) didn’t have anything from the series.

At this point I went looking for the current publisher. What I found was an extensive catalog, but only in print…and a history of the series that shed some light on what was going on.

The original publisher is long gone, and the rights have bounced around over the years. In 2020, the current publisher and the company that remastered the artwork in the early 2000s resolved a long-running dispute over the rights. It doesn’t say anything about digital editions, but given the timing, I wondered if that’s when the digital catalog dropped off of ComiXology.

Update: Found It!

The publisher was kind enough to point out that their books should be available digitally on B&N, and that they’re planning to sell ebooks through their own store sometime in 2023.

It turns out that I hadn’t narrowed down my search query enough at Barnes & Noble. If I hadn’t started this late at night, I probably would have tried searching for “Classics Illustrated Les Misérables” next, which would have turned up both the print and eBook editions, as well as several other cheap eBooks that happen to have illustrations in them.

Apparently Barnes & Noble’s catalog thinks Classics Illustrated’s print and ebook lines are completely separate, because none of the books I spot-checked link from one edition to the other.

So yes, you can still buy their adaptation of Les Misérables as an eBook! At least if you have a Nook device or app. (For future reference, here is a direct link to a more exact search for Classics Illustrated on the Nook.)

Library Scans

At the time I wrote this (December 2022), the Internet Archive had a collection of scans of the series from the 1940s through the 1960s, including their 1960s version of Les Misérables. As of March 2023, they are no longer available.

Who Are Les Misérables?

2022-09-24T18:50:00Z

Response to a reader who asked my thoughts on TheChaostician’s A Comparative Book / Movie Review of LES MISÉRABLES

It’s interesting. I agree with a lot of the comments about losing complexity, but I don’t have as much of a problem with the character changes (partly because I’m used to the stage version, where Gavroche is less political and the Thénardiers are funny, but still dangerous)

Éponine’s probably the biggest change that isn’t just a simplification, but I think her role in the story still works, even if the details have been changed.

I do have a problem with the finale, because it’s not Jean Valjean’s heaven by any stretch of the imagination. It works better on stage, where it’s more like a curtain call for all the characters who have died.

The main place I disagree with the post, though, is about the theme and title.

The book does not use the phrase “the miserable” until over halfway through. This is clearly a title drop, so it is important to pay attention…Who is this [passage] referring to in particular? The Thénardiers… The musical is a call for liberty for people who are unjustly suffering. The book is a call for compassion for people who are justly suffering.

Listening to The Les Misérables Reading Companion talking about how the word is perceived in French makes it clear that all of the main characters are “miserables” and Hugo is linking the sympathetic wretched like Valjean and Fantine with the clearly evil wretched like the Thénardiers because, as far as society is concerned, they’re the same. Society looks at Fantine and thinks she’s just as depraved as Thénardier.

And Hugo is arguing that they all deserve compassion, that they all should have a better life, that society should treat them all better, whether they turn to evil when they fall or not. Including the Thénardiers, yes, but not only them.

So the musical is less of a complete inversion of the theme and (once again) more of a simplification

The Brick...and the Cinder Block

2022-09-02T00:00:00Z

I finally decided to pick up a print copy of Christine Donougher’s translation, which is my favorite of the modern English versions. I couldn’t find it in hardcover, but I did find a paperback that was bigger than I was expecting. Here it is next to my old, yellowed, falling-apart copy of the Denny translation that I picked up in the early 1990s.

It’s bigger in all three dimensions, and weighs more than twice as much. Seriously, I weighed them. The old one is 0.59 kg and the new one is 1.45 kg.

If the old copy was the brick, this is a cinder block.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d bought the hardcover, but the paperback?

I guess using higher-quality paper and normal-sized type will do that.

New Manga Release

While I was looking for the book, I discovered that Takahiro Arai’s manga adaptation, originally published in Japan from 2013-2016, is being translated into English! The first of four volumes is coming in December 2022. I, uh, may have pre-ordered it within a few minutes of discovering it.

This is a different adaptation than the single-volume Manga Classics version, an English-first production that I reviewed a few years back. This one looks amazing, and I’m really looking forward to reading it!

Anime

And that discovery reminded me to look up Shōjo Cosette again. The 52-episode anime series adapts the book with Cosette as the main character, and ran in Japan in 2007. But as near as I can tell, it’s never been (officially) translated into English or even (officially) released in the western hemisphere.

Officially.

Gotta be some fan subs out there…

It's 1817 All Over Again

2021-04-06T00:00:00Z

Every time through the book, the bishop’s chapters are more interesting. But “In the Year 1817” gets more tedious each time through.

Argot, the sewers, the convent - there’s at least some substance there and you can see how things connect. “1817” is just a list of contemporary pop culture references that would already have been barely relevant 50 years on, never mind 200 years on and across the world.

Modern editions of it have more footnotes than text. Last time I read it, it took forever because I was looking up every footnote as I got to it.

And it’s all ONE LONG PARAGRAPH.

Now on Gemini

2021-03-21T00:00:00Z

I’ve been experimenting with the Gemini protocol, an ultra-light internet system that’s somewhere between a souped-up Gopher (for those of you who remember Gopher) and a stripped-down web. No inline images, no scripts, no styling, no cookies, no forms, no tracking - just bare-bones text, links, lists and headings. Pretty well suited for blogs.

Eleventy doesn’t seem to be happy with generating multiple formats from the same source, so I ended up cobbling together some scripts combining the structure I already have here, pre-processing some of the “front matter” (like titles and dates) and piping it to md2gemini.

So now you can read this blog both as a website and as a Gemini capsule!

Project Gemini is a good introduction if you’ve never used it.

You do need a Gemini browser to read Gemini sites, or “capsules.” 2025 update: I’ve reviewed several, of which Lagrange is still my favorite on both desktop and mobile devices. And if you want to go really minimalist and use a terminal app, Amfora is your best bet.

The site is a bit rough in Gemini. I’ve got eight years’ worth of writing for the web on here, and while the actual text should be fine, an automated converter doesn’t know which images, links, etc. are important and which aren’t. So just as it took me a while to update all the WordPress-specific code when moving the site to Eleventy, it’s probably going to take me a while to adjust my conversion scripts (and in some cases the Markdown itself) to polish up the Gemlog version of the site.

Authority

2021-01-13T00:00:00Z

Javert is authoritarian, but he’s not a leader. He’s a follower of what he thinks authority dictates to him. Why? because he craves certainty. He hates having to think for himself. And submitting to authority lets him justify any cruelty he does because it must be righteous!

Russell Crowe was horribly miscast as a singing Inspector Javert, but he would’ve been incredible in a non-musical adaptation.

And that visual image of him tightrope-walking on the edge of the roof during “Stars” is cinematically perfect as a metaphor for the way he sees the world and the way he goes about it. Narrow path, not an inch to the east, not an inch to the west, no thought, no decision, just one foot in front of the other or you’re doomed and it’s your own fault.

So when Valjean puts him into a position where he suddenly has to start thinking for himself, he can’t justify who he’s been. And he can’t decide what path to follow, because he isn’t used to making decisions. He freaks out and jumps because he can’t actually process anything.

Death by cognitive dissonance.

Abridged Abolitionism

2021-01-05T00:00:00Z

Years ago I saw a mention of Les Misérables being popular with Confederate soldiers, who were nicknamed “Lee’s Miserables.” I thought it odd that people fighting a war to preserve slavery would have liked a book about how you shouldn’t treat people horribly even if they’re on the lower rungs of society.

As I reread the book, I found it even stranger, since the the rare times America is mentioned, it’s to approve of the revolution or to condemn slavery. Thénardier, the one major character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, moves to America after he leaves Paris to become a slave trader. More pointedly, Hugo praises John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, only three years before the novel’s publication and very much in the national consciousness as one of the events building up to the Civil War. What did they think of those references?

Well…

As I was putting the finishing touches on my list of links to English translations of the book yesterday, I decided to check Wikipedia on Les Mis to see if there were any other translations that I didn’t know about. It turns out there was one more:

An 1863 edition published in Richmond that “fixed” the “Yankee” translation from the previous year.

Ugh.

“Some Translations of Les Misérables” (Olin H. Moore*) explains that the 1863 “Richmond Edition” was based on Charles Wilbour’s 1862 translation, allegedly to correct the translation of French idioms (which they apparently did, at least in the first volume). But they also made some cuts. The article quotes from the editor’s preface to the edition:

A few scattered sentences, reflecting on slavery – which the author, with strange inconsistency, has thought fit to introduce into a work written mainly to denounce the European systems of labor as gigantic instruments of tyranny and oppression – it has also been deemed advisable to strike out…the absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers.

What, slavery is supposed to be off-topic because the book’s only about European oppression? You’re telling me you can’t generalize a book that starts by describing its intent to discuss universal truths?

I shouldn’t be surprised, but FFS!