Les Misérables

It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually
every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most
popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In
this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean — a man unjustly
imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently
realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert — Hugo achieves the
sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its
genre. Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the
most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the
nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama — highly particularized
and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications — of the
redemption of one human being. One of the half-dozen greatest novels of the
world. —Upton Sinclair The greatest of all novels. —Leo Tolstoy Hugo is
unquestionably the most powerful talent that has appeared in France in the
nineteenth century. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky I sobbed and wailed and thought
[books] were the greatest things. —Susan Sontag