It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century
and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today
Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" is neglected by readers and
undervalued by critics. In "The Temptation of the Impossible," one
of the world's great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, helps us to
appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo's
masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of
fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a
different and better world.
Hugo, Vargas Llosa says, had at least two goals in "Les
Miserables"--to create a complete fictional world and, through it,
to change the real world. Despite the impossibility of these aims,
Hugo makes them infectious, sweeping up the reader with his energy
and linguistic and narrative skill. "Les Miserables," Vargas Llosa
argues, embodies a utopian vision of literature--the idea that
literature can not only give us a supreme experience of beauty, but
also make us more virtuous citizens, and even grant us a glimpse of
the "afterlife, the immortal soul, God." If Hugo's aspiration to
transform individual and social life through literature now seems
innocent, Vargas Llosa says, it is still a powerful ideal that
great novels like "Les Miserables" can persuade us is true."
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