The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Mis駻ables (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691131115)

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 Mis駻ables 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 Mis駻ables--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 Mis駻ables, 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 Mis駻ables can persuade us is true.

Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
ISBN-10: 0691131112
ISBN-13: 9780691131115
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/23/2007
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.84w x 0.79d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/01/2007 pg. 81
Booklist 05/01/2007 pg. 64
New York Review of Books 06/28/2007 pg. 52
Foreword 07/01/2007 pg. 78