/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20080265]

Overrated overly sentimental shit. The characters suck. The plot sucks. The themes suck. 0/10

[Anonymous No.20080278]

You sound mad.

[Anonymous No.20080365]

>>20080265
>I would like to analyze the moral atmosphere which hovers and circulates in his poems [and novels], which partakes very sensibly of the author's own temperament. It seems to me to carry a very obvious character of equal love for what is very-strong as for what is very-weak, and the attraction exerted on the poet by these two extremes derives from a single source, which is the very strength, the original vigor with which he is endowed.
>Thus he is irresistibly carried towards any symbol of infinity, the sea, the sky; towards all the ancient representatives of force, Homeric or biblical giants, paladins, knights; towards the enormous and formidable beasts.
>Few people have noticed the charm and enchantment that goodness adds to strength, and which is so frequently seen in the works of our poet. A smile and a tear in the face of a colossus, it is an almost divine originality.
>It is quite obvious that the author wanted, in Les Misérables, to create living abstractions, ideal figures, each of whom, representing one of the main types necessary for the development of his thesis, was raised to an epic height. It is a novel constructed in the manner of a poem, and where each character is exceptional only by the hyperbolic way in which he represents a generality.
>The way in which Victor Hugo conceived and built this novel, and in which he threw in an indefinable fusion, to make of it a new Corinthian metal, the rich elements generally devoted to special works (the lyric sense, the epic sense, the philosophical sense), confirms once more the fatality which dragged him, when he was younger, to transform the old ode and the old tragedy, up to the point, that is to say, up to the poems and the dramas that we read today.
Mass education was a mistake

[Anonymous No.20080371]

what are the themes in this exactly? Would I going to enjoy it if I like stuff like Tolstoy and dostoyevsky? I have a hard time trusting the french to produce anything but degenerate schlock

[Anonymous No.20080486]

>>20080371
i quite liked it, the main message that i got was an attack on apathy to suffering, and a warning against a black and white moral world view.

[Anonymous No.20080498]

>>20080371
Victor Hugo is the greatest of all incorrigible romanticists. Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive imagination which is very rare except in children—and in spite of his theatrical gestures he has the power of conjuring up scenes of incredible beauty and terror.

[Anonymous No.20080519]

>>20080265
sounds like this board needs more sentimental shit considering all the antinatalists here.

[Anonymous No.20080570]

>>20080498
He also really liked to get his ding dong wet

[Anonymous No.20080655]

>>20080365
>Hugo's works are hyperbolic because he himself was an excitable guy.
>So he had this classical-epic vibe going.
>But he humanized it by showing his extreme characters to be vulnerable.
>So what you get in Les Misérables is hyperbolic archetypes reminiscent of classical epics, but written with a sense of lyricism that modernizes his mixture of ode and tragedy into drama.
Don't waste my time.

[Anonymous No.20080721]

>>20080655
Which novels do you recc?

[Anonymous No.20080753]

>>20080265
I liked the Notre-Dame a lot more.

[Anonymous No.20080845]

>>20080265
read last day of a condemned man first, if you liked that les mis is the same but better and with a wider scope (skip the non plot chapters, including most of the waterloo stuff except the last few pages)

[Anonymous No.20080855]

>>20080570
Find that a bit alien do you

[Anonymous No.20080866]

If you didn't read it in French then you didn't read it at all