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    Les Misérables
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    Les Misérables
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    Les Misérables
    Audiobook62 hours

    Les Misérables

    Written by Victor Hugo

    Narrated by Pete Cross

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Considered to be French novelist Victor Hugo's masterpiece, Les Miserables, which was published in 1862, is a sprawling historical and philosophical epic that covers from 1815 through the Paris Uprising in 1832.

    Notable for its many subplots and digressions from the main storyline, the novel's stated aim is a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, which can be seen most clearly in the story of the central character Jean Valjean, an ex-convict who struggles to shake the sins of his past and become a good man.

    Widely adapted, the novel inspired the blockbuster musical and movie colloquially known as Les Mis. This is an unabridged audio recording of the 1887 Isabel F. Hapgood translation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateOct 17, 2018
    ISBN9781974917693
    Author

    Victor Hugo

    Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the most well-regarded French writers of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, novelist and dramatist, and he is best remembered in English as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). Hugo was born in Besançon, and became a pivotal figure of the Romantic movement in France, involved in both literature and politics. He founded the literary magazine Conservateur Littéraire in 1819, aged just seventeen, and turned his hand to writing political verse and drama after the accession to the throne of Louis-Philippe in 1830. His literary output was curtailed following the death of his daughter in 1843, but he began a new novel as an outlet for his grief. Completed many years later, this novel became Hugo's most notable work, Les Misérables.

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    Reviews for Les Misérables

    4.5/5

    4,494 ratings139 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

      It will always be Belmondo when I think of Jean Valjean in that wonky adaptation I saw at the Vogue back in the 90s. The film affected me deeply, thinking about the Occupation and questions of race and justice; the Willa Cather quote which surfaces a number of times. Beyond all that, the smoldering desire to read the novel was forged and eventually realized. I read Les Miserables here and there, with airports occupying a great deal of the effort. One drunken night in New Orleans the following year I spied someone in a pub reading the novel with obvious pleasure. I wished the man well and tripped out into the balmy night.
    • 5/5
      Triumph of the human spirit!
    • 4/5
      Phew - this was a long one. I downloaded a French edition to an e-reader and read it on the T. Hugo loves to digress and I found myself zoning out on the long descriptions of Waterloo and such. The man did love his language though and there are some great passages and lots of interesting words that the weak French/English dictionary installed on the reader couldn't handle. Who knew there were so many French words for hovel? The best parts of course were the adventures of Jean Valjean, the badass ex-prisoner who knew how to escape and be a loving father to the orphan Cosette.
    • 5/5
      One volume beautiful edition. Original translation authorized by Victor Hugo himself.
    • 4/5
      Wow, I knew going in that this was a beast of a book. I knew the basic plot from the movies and the musical, but I was not prepared in the least for the political and social commentary about the dregs of French society.

      The story of Jean Valjean, Fantine, and Cosette, is the heart of the book. If this is the story you are looking for, I'd recommend finding a good abridged version. If you want to know about the innumerable details of Waterloo (skewed toward the French viewpoint, of course), French monasteries and convents, the treatment of galley slaves, the lives of the thousands of homeless children in and around Paris... I could go on, but you get the point. This book is more of a treatise on the downtrodden and how the more-fortunate need to turn their attention and wealth to helping them.

      I do love this story, which is a perfect analogy of redemption and salvation. Jean Valjean, the galley slave turned mayor turned fugitive. Cosette, the young girl saved out the pit of despair and pain. It's a wonderful story, if you can get through many, many tangents that push and pull the characters.
    • 5/5
      Les Misérables was one of the first full-length (very full length!) books I managed to read in French. I can still remember the Friday afternoon, all those years ago, when I began to read it. I didn't look up from its pages until the following Sunday evening. A truly magnificent book.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written, long-winded but informative. I read the Denny translation and listened to the Hopwood translation read by Homewood. Jean Valjean forever!
    • 5/5
      I always remember cursing Hugo for the last eight pages when I knew he was putting on the emotional tourniquet but I had to cry anyway. I am still not utterly convinced of the suicide element and I think Cosette was awful just dumping Val Jean after he had been a father to her, but I suppose Hugo knew how people are.

      I read this long before the musical which is nothing like this book. The huge introspection, the brilliant 100 pages on the priest at the beginning who does one thing and on thing only to change Val Jean's life. The unremitting unfairness of it all, the weariness of a society of animals pretending to be rational for its own sake and not for the sake of their inescapable natures.

    • 3/5
      Les Miserables is generally recognized as a ground-breaking work of fiction, a masterful and epic tale of social condemnation and individual redemption that serves as a foundation work in Western Culture. And, indeed, Les Mis itself has become a cottage industry, with its poor, miserable characters now gracing Broadway theatres, Loews cinemas and home theatre systems around the world. After reading Les Mis, I am convinced that it is indeed one of the most deservedly influential works in Western Literature. Hugo’s deep thoughts on the French revolution and its children have long challenged the imagination of middle school Parisians and untutored heartlanders struggling to follow a broadway score. His influence continues to be felt through stories that interweave historical fact and individual psychological turmoil, including such epic sagas as the Thorn Birds and the Forsyte Saga. Hugo simultaneously gives us insight into the society and culture, much as a good article in Newsweek might, and the kind of deep understanding of individual pathos I remember having upon first reading Freud when I was 15. It is a powerful combination. While other great works, works like Moby Dick or Paradise Lost, challenge the reader, assume some reasonable level of knowledge and intelligence, and urge the reader to stretch their world view, Hugo has the wisdom to write for the less literary, indeed, we might even say, less literate, and meticulously clarifies everything that has already been made clear, and then repeats it again, helping us to understand even the most trivial points in great detail. Indeed, one of the beauties of this book is that if you miss something the first time, you will likely be able to catch it the fourth time, and thus need not read too closely. It is as if Hugo has anticipated the entire genre of the modern daytime serial drama.In sum, Les Mis was everything I thought it would be, and deserves to be recognized as the groundbreaking, influential work it is, a work fully worthy of television serialization. Indeed, after completing it, I thought, "Wow! Now that's almost as good as the Epic of the Wheat!" High praise, indeed.
    • 5/5
      I'm not a fan of Hugo's long tangents, but it's still a worthwhile book.
    • 5/5
      This translation reportedly is loose and in more casual language that will date rapidly rather than true to the original's tone. That does matter to me but what matters more is that it's an audio book -- and slang sounds better aloud than it reads silently -- and audio is the only medium in which I can read this. Especially when narrated by George Guidall.

      Abut halfway through: I think Hugo read too much Dickens. These coincidences of who recognizes whom and who lives where are making my eyes roll right out of my head and making me wonder if there was more than one police officer in the whole of France, since just the one roams from the Mediterranean to the English Channel and knows everyone in Paris by sight.

      Afterward: I really enjoyed the narration, which I do not credit Hugo for but which affected my rating. I enjoyed Hugo's musings on Napoleon, sewers, the Seine, and all the rest, but I'm glad I got to listen to them instead of having to read them. If I had read, I might have skimmed and felt guilty, but this way my attention could wander at will. The story itself was, as I said above, Dickensian, beggaring belief that Gavrotte happened to help his little brothers or to be on the spot to assist his father, that Thénardier and Javert were both everywhere at once. Dickens managed his coincidences better. The only thing I really couldn't fathom was anyone's love of Cosette. Okay, I understand Valjean's, because he was angelic and had rescued her from indenture and raised her from a child, and I understand Marius's initial admiration of a pretty, modest young woman, but her subsequent simperings and willingness to forget Valjean tried my last nerve.
    • 5/5
      Victor Hugo is one of my favorite authors. He wrote very politically-charged works.This one focuses on themes of revolution, poverty, classism, and injustice. But the story is not just about the French Revolution. Hugo builds some very lovable and very hateable characters. Jean Val Jean has a rare dignity and integrity that perseveres through all his many misfortunes. The protagonists are also well-illustrated. Javert struggles when his firm belief in order contrasts with realities, and the resulting cognitive dissonance is not often so well portrayed.Les Mis is so full of weaving plot twists and coincidences that made me gasp in surprise. I really got attached to the characters, and had a hard time when bad things happened to them.This version of the book is abridged, and I'm glad of that. I think they did a good job of keeping the plot lines in tact, while removing Hugo's out-dated ramblings about .. architecture, or whatever. (He does make fine points in his ramblings, but could do so in 2 paragraphs!)While the movies and musical are also very good, they do cut out much of the plot, so the book is worth reading.
    • 4/5
      I started this book with a little trepidation, I have to admit, as it is such an enormous book in every sense of the word! It was quite daunting knowing this is one of those great classics written so long ago, in such an old, fashioned style, that I wasn't sure what to expect!And I have to say I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the story. There was a huge amount of french historical information and at times I did find this quite hard going as the author went off in a tangent at some length, but once I got used to that I found the actual story really good, miserable though it was!! The traumers and misery that the characters encountered were at times unbelievably heartbreaking, but I really did enjoy it.I can see quite easily why it has been such a successful film and musical.As I said before not an easy book to get through but well worth the effort.
    • 5/5
      Les Mis is, to me, the best book I've ever read. It's full of the very best, and worst, of humanity. I can think of no other book that shows the whole range of mankind. The length may be a put off to some, but anyone who perseveres will be well rewarded and emerge better for having read this.
    • 4/5
      An incredible writer who needed a better editor. I loved it anyway.
    • 5/5
      Great book, but man it was long.
    • 5/5
      I got my copy of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" when I was in high school (more than 20 years ago) after seeing the musical. I know I tackled reading it, as there are pen marks in some of the margins, but I'm not terribly sure I ever finished it. With the release of the new (and excellent) movie, I thought this was the time to give it a reread. I'm ever so glad I did.... and I had no trouble finishing it this time. In fact, it was hard to put down.What you can you say about Hugo's epic that hasn't already been said? It's beautifully written with characters that leap off the page. The novel encompasses a huge amount of period French history, putting the characters in the thick of the action of some important (and unimportant events.) It is a story of redemption, of love, of suffering. The only criticism I can lodge is that some of Hugo's tangents go on a bit long... (I now know more than I ever need to about Waterloo, for example) and pull away from the story. At times I wondered if we were ever going to get back to Jean Valjean's story. Still, I can't help giving this five stars because I just loved the book enough to overlook that minor quibble. This is truly just a great book.
    • 5/5
      Not since The Poisonwood Bible has a book moved me and had such a complete impact on my soul. For years I had watched the musical and that was enough for me. Thanks to my group Who Doesn't Love a Classic? which has this for their year read this year, I would have never picked up this gem.Now I see that I have only witnessed half the story and found myself reading for eight, nine hours at a time. It was the first thing I picked up in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. I longed to know more about M. Bienvenu and with each page I had a greater respect for him. I mourned with Jean Valjean when he passed.Throughout the book is the constant reminder of redemption throughout the book. That is, except for the Thenardiers. Never have I loathed two people more in literature (perhaps I will change my mind when I read Dickens). They had zero redeeming qualities. While the musical may make them the comic relief, there is nothing comical about them in the book.This took me almost three weeks to read and while I had been intimidated to read such a lengthy book, I found the language glorious and if it were not for sleep, I may have read this quicker.I'm sure at the time this was written, the scenes of Waterloo and the sewer system was interesting. I must admit though, fifty pages describing the sewer system made me want to take a hot shower and stay there. I'm not interested all that much in the Napoleonic Wars and therefore didn't have a lot of interest in the pages and pages of Waterloo.One of the best books I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      Victor Hugo describes in this book criticizes social injustice in FranceShowing the novel nature of good and evil and the law in the breathtaking story of the Paris landmarks show, ethics, philosophy, law, justice, religion and the nature of romantic and familial love.Les Miserables great novel because Victor Hugo was a romantic at heart, and the book is filled with moments of great poetry and beauty. The depth of the internal vision and the fact that made him a classic for Aihddh time, one of the great works in Western literature even today after 150 years of writing, the book remains a powerful story of Les Miserables .
    • 5/5
      Another of my favorite classics. Each time I read it, I catch something new and interesting.
    • 5/5
      This book is a masterpiece.It is an incredible story of temptations, redemptions, evil, love; it describes how miserablelife in that era of France was for the common people. A story about real life, with fictional characters creating real people, and the social perspective is as true today as it was in the past.
    • 5/5
      I read the abridged version when I was in 9th grade and I absolutely fell into the story - I loved it! I want to revisit this one again soon, but go for the unabridged version (which will be a bit of a challenge but I'm up for it). I have yet to see the adaptation and would like to read it before I do watch it.
    • 4/5
      The story of the results of forgiveness and grace is powerful. I really grew to love, hate, pity, and otherwise empathize with the characters in this book. At times the writing was amazingly beautiful, at others the insights were hilarious or profound. All in all an excellent, mostly terribly sad book. However, reading the entirety of this unabridged version has really opened my eyes to the potential benefit of an abridged version of this, or other massive classic works. There were hundreds of pages in this book that could have been omitted without detriment to the story, in fact, not having to trudge through these parts may have made it more powerful by not losing the emotional pull of the story as we wade through 70+ pages on how nuns lived in certain convents (which convent I believe was given fewer pages of story than the historical exposition). I'd be afraid to have a child read the unabridged, lest I destroyed his love of books. :/
    • 3/5
      The main plotline deserves 4½ stars but the lengthy digressions are tedious and almost enough to make one stop reading. I would recommend an abridged edition!Thoughts about the main story:·I really liked the character of Gavroche, the street urchin.·Marius frustrated and annoyed me; he took positions that seemed unwarranted and extreme (like refusing the allowance his grandfather wanted to give him or turning Valjean away from Cosette), but I admired the fact that he stuck by his ideas.·Cosette's character was a bit underdeveloped and I didn't like the way she took Marius' judgment for her own after they married.·I actually felt sorry for Javert at the end - his world view was disrupted and he couldn't handle it. He was much less of the pursuing vengeance than his character is portrayed as being in the movie version...·The ending - say the last book of Vol. 5 - was so sad!! I cried at several places, which is unusual for me.
    • 3/5
      At the heart of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo lies an endearing, larger-than-life tale about the redemption of a fallen man, but good luck soldiering through everything else. The main story, the one directly related to our protagonist, Jean Valjean, by way of characters Fantine, Javert, Cosette or Marius, is buried deep under the biggest heap of literary filler I have ever encountered in a book. I'm talking hundreds of pages of backstory for minor characters, places, military battles and cultural commentary. Hundreds. Of pages. Overall, Les Mis is very readable and elegant. It's like listening to a beloved professor's lecturing voice, never mind the content. Still, I'm not sure what to call all this unnecessary padding. Expositional stalling?
    • 4/5
      Finally, I have defeated the behemoth. Les Misérables has been vanquished and will probably never again stray from my bookshelf. Which is a shame, because the story itself is really good, and Jean Valjean will go down in my personal literary history as one of my top ten characters. He's very well-written while also being almost completely admirable, which is somewhat rare. But Victor Hugo felt it necessary to give the complete history of every aspect of anything mentioned in his story. Something happens to one of the characters during the battle of Waterloo? Forty pages detailing the entire battle, but not in such a way that a person who doesn't already have a good grasp of Who's Who In The Napoleonic Wars can understand it. A character escapes through the Paris sewer system? Let's have a lengthy treatise on the history, advantages, and shortcomings thereof. Yes, OF THE SEWER SYSTEM. (not for reading while eating, that section). And then there were the discussions of all these little barricaded city uprisings in early 19th century Paris which I was supposed to already know about, but which I was basically just hearing about for the first time (thank you public school system), and let's not forget the pages of tribute to the city of Paris itself and all its beauties and uglinesses and street urchins, and all the pages devoted to discussions of royalists and how they felt about republicans and how everyone felt about Buonapartists, and all the allusions to Voltaire and Rousseau... all of which succeeded in making me feel like a complete idiot because I had only the faintest of faint ideas what they were talking about. All this extra stuff seriously dampened my enjoyment of what was otherwise a really, really superb book.I am reminded of a discussion on an author's weblog about how much the author should tell, and how much s/he should assume her readers will be able to figure out (the author in question had been accused of being overly subtle, since she runs little subtexts through her stories which are so well-hidden that almost nobody finds them). Hugo seemed to miss the boat completely on both sides of this issue. He assumed knowledge on his readers' part about the intricacies of French (and even more specifically, Parisian) government and customs in the early nineteenth century, while simultaneously feeling the need to go into far too much detail about nearly inconsequential side issues. If he'd made five or six books out of this one -- one ripping good yarn and several academic treatises on various subjects in which he was obviously quite interested and well-versed -- he'd have saved at least this reader a lot of frustration. For once there's a book for which a condensed treatment on film would be a blessing. I can't wait to see the movie of this one.
    • 5/5
      Well this is nothing but the French War and Peace, is what this is. And if it doesn't quite plumb the psychological depths of the human individual like Tolstoy's work does, it contains more, far more, of the real, common human life that we share. "Man is a depth still more profound than the people", says Jean Valjean, but that good old man is wrong, and this book is 1463 pages of passionate refutation.
    • 5/5
      Does anyone know who's the translator of this excellent version? Appears to be a reproduction of an early British or American edition - how annoying that the publisher tells us nothing!
    • 5/5
      I can't express the sensations this book provoked in me. I thought I had read good books until I found this one. Jean Valljean, Fantine, Cossette... They showed me the meaning of living and dying in this unfair but beautiful world.
    • 4/5
      Other than the pages-long lists of mythological and literary analogies, I really enjoyed Les Miserables. Yes, even the 60 pages devoted to play-by-play action at Waterloo, and the complete history of the Paris sewers were interesting. Jean Valjean is without question a rousing and sympathetic hero, and Javert and Thenardier interesting and well-developed foils. Good stuff.