Les Miserables (Penguin Classics) Paperback – April 29, 1982

How can you leave anything less than 5 stars on the Norman Denny translation of Les Misérables? unless...unless! you own a paperback copy of the Penguin Classic and wanted to used said copy as a working copy that you could underline, mark up, and make notes in the margin and then have this "illustrated" hard backed copy with hopefully slightly better paper than the paperback's newspaper-like quality to have on the shelve to revisit.The illustrations? Well, there is a silhouette of a bird on the title page and there is the cover art - and that's it for that. The paper quality is no better than the paperback version.I'm not sending it back because it was a good deal and finding the Norman Denny translation is difficult (I'm still searching for an e-book version.) So, thank goodness for the quality of the author. I have a feeling that like Cervantes Don Quixote, I will be perpetually re-reading this incredible work.

Adding to our set.

I'm glad to see so many young people drawn to the book via the musical or the movie versions. If there were one writer I would want to know on a personal basis via his work it would have been Victor Hugo. He must have had an enormously generous heart and spirit as evidenced by his writing. This is probably the most sympathetic, almost God-like perspective of humanity that I have ever come across in literature. And what a sweeping cyclorama Hugo portrays. From the fields of Waterloo to the sewers of Paris, Hugo's eye of god sees everything. The Waterloo passages are often discarded in the abridgements, but to me they play an important part in allowing the reader to pull back and look at things from this god-like point-of-view. The great panoramic macrocosm of history is seen in conjunction with the vivid details of Jean Valjean's microcosmic struggle. Of course the characters, which I thought were rather cleverly encapsulated in the musical, are here given their true range and scope. That Hugo loved these characters is abundantly clear. This love is absorbed by the reader. Every time Jabert comes close to capturing Jean, it is as if we were in Jean's shoes. Hugo far outshines Dickens in his depiction of lower class existence in a 19th century European city. His Paris is inhabited by much more convincing urchins. All his characters in fact, are much more believable. Dickens is much more overtly sentimental. Hugo lets the story affect the reader. There is no sense of straining to convey an effect. With Dickens, I am always aware of the puppetmaster straining to get a point across. He is a polemical writer compared to Hugo. He relies on heavy-handed bathos. Hugo remains much more in the background and we are left essentially unaware of his machinations. That's why, for me, I respond more viscerally to Hugo as I respond more depply to great art in general. My primary appeal to readers is that they don't do Hugo the disservice of reading an abridged version of this novel. You may not be all that interested in the causes behind the rebellion that led to Marius's mounting of the barricade, but I assure you you will not be bored by the lengthier version. Great writers don't waste their time on superfluous details. Every word is there for a reason. Let the Master of the House display his wares in full.

I bought this Norman Denny translation in January 2013. Originally, I'd gotten the Isabel F. Hapgood translation (the one with the silhouette of a reading girl surrounded by cat-tails) on my Kindle. However, the spaces between paragraphs were too wide, so I had to flip pages quite often. This got quite annoying after 450 pages. Also, the language in the Kindle edition was a little difficult to understand, and there were random accent marks on random words -- the editing wasn't the best.However, the Norman Denny translation's easy to understand (the English is the English we speak in the 21st Century, and not what was spoken in the 19th Century). There might have been some spelling or grammatical errors, but far less than in the Kindle edition. While I was reading the Kindle edition, I kept on glancing at the percentage metre to see when I would hit the next percent. Because it was a Kindle e-book, I could only rely on the percentage metre to see how far I was in the book. Also, when I got to one of those useless rants about social injustice, I kept on having to hit the "Go To" button to go to the Table of Contents and see how many more chapters I had to endure of the boring stuff. With the hard-copy book, I could just flip through the book until I found the next chapter.This translation in itself's fine, but the content isn't. First, there are the useless rants about social injustice that nobody really cares about. Victor Hugo might have been right about the social issues in the 1860's, but why would he put them in a romance novel? He ought to have taken all his rants from Les Mis and put them in separate essays. Gladly, according to what one of my friends who read this Les Mis translation said, Norman Denny gets rid of at least 50 pages of Hugo's rants.Second, in Part I, Book I ("An Upright Man"), Hugo dedicates the first 50 pages of his great masterpiece to talking about the daily life and good deeds of the extremely nice Bishop of Digne. Although the Bishop figures in only 100 pages of the 1400 page book, Hugo describes him the most. Alright, we get the point that the Bishop's the nicest bloke in the world!Third, Hugo dedicates another 50 pages to an epic description of the June 1815 Battle of Waterloo. He finally gets to some story in the last two pages. Hugo mentions places such as Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Braine-l'Alleud, Mont-Saint-Jean, Genappe, Nivelles, etc. that nobody knows about. All those locations are somewhere in southern Belgium and northern France, but only locals would know the places. As these locations figure quite prominently in Part II, Book I ("Waterloo"), it's quite difficult trying to understand the Battle of Waterloo if you don't know where any of the locations are. If locations aren't confusing enough, Hugo mentions people such as Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, Halkett, Mitchell, Somerset, etc. that nobody knows about. Personally, the only names I recognised in "Waterloo" were "the Duke of Wellington" and "Napoleon". Because the Battle of Waterloo only occurred about 50 years after Les Mis was first published, Hugo expects his audience to know who Blücher, the Prince of Orange, Chassé, etc. were. However, it's almost 200 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and people only recognise the names of the two principal generals/commanders -- the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte. Even so, some people only know who Napoleon is, and not the Duke of Wellington. I read "Waterloo" on my Kindle, so I kept on going to the Table of Contents and looking at all the chapters in "Waterloo" to see how much longer I had to endure it.Fourth, in Part II, Book VI ("Le Petit-Picus"), Hugo uses 30 pages to explain the history of the Petit-Picus convent. Seriously? The Petit-Picus convent only figures in about 100 pages out of 1400 pages. The convent's also extinct -- it died about 150 years ago.Fifth, in Part II, Book VII ("The Convent as an Abstract Idea"), 15 pages are dedicated to explaining as to why a convent is actually a prison. Why doesn't Victor Hugo just put all that rubbish in another essay, instead of in Les Mis?Sixth, the name of Part IV, Book I ("A Few Pages of History") is a serious misnomer. Thirty-four pages of history isn't considered "a few pages of history".Seventh, in Part IV, Book VII ("Argot"), 20 pages are used to talk about slang. Evidently, the slang of the 1830's is completely different from the slang of the 2010's. So why can't Victor Hugo get rid of all that rubbish?Eighth, in Part V, Book II ("The Entrails of the Monster"), Hugo uses 20 pages to describe the Paris sewers. Although the sewers might have some prominence, overall, they're not that important.I made the mistake of reading "An Upright Man", "Waterloo", "Le Petit-Picus", "The Convent as an Abstract Idea", "A Few Pages of History", and "The Entrails of the Monster". Fortunately, I didn't read "Argot". Whenever I was reading these seven sections, I kept on thinking, "Mr. Hugo, can we PLEASE get on with the story?". PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF READING THESE SEVEN SECTIONS. THEY ARE A WASTE OF YOUR TIME. YOU WILL REGRET IT IF YOU DO! Otherwise, read everything else. Les Mis is actually quite good -- just not the eight sections.The title of this review is "Monsieur Gillenormand Lives", because my favourite character in Les Mis is Monsieur Gillenormand, the 90-year-old grandfather of Marius Pontmercy, one of the main characters. I think Norman Denny's representation of Monsieur Gillenormand is marvelous. Monsieur Gillenormand was the only character who made me laugh in a serious book. My second favourite character was Grantaire, who was quite comical as well, but not as much as Monsieur Gillenormand.

Recently, I bought this for my son for Christmas cause he starred in Les Miserables and he didn’t even own the book so I highly recommend good quality and it looks great in your library