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.
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Character
Earnest, epic, grave and prestige.
- earnestironic
- intimateepic
- gravecomic
- unpretentiousprestige
- cooloverwhelming
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About the book
- Author
- Victor Hugo
- First published
- 1863
- Pages
- 520
- Publisher
- Baker Street Press, The Macmillan company, HarperCollins Publishers
- Editions
- 526
- Language
- German, yid, Italian, Portuguese
- ISBN
- 9781115828161
Where to read
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On Open Library, 105 have read it and 878 want to.
“In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.”
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (known in English also as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though a committed conservative royalist when he was young, Hugo grew more liberal
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