The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Book Overview

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

From acclaimed novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa, what Hugo's masterpiece reveals about the art of the novel

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 rables 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 rables--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 rables, 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 rables can persuade us is true.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691131112
• ISBN13: 9780691131115
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Mario Vargas Llosa and Victor Hugo's "Les miserables"

This is a review of Victor Hugo's "Les miserables", of its characters and the religious meaning that the work (a huge novel attempting to cover everything) had for his author. It ends with MVL's interesting opinion on the influence of literature upon social life in open and close societies. It is a not very long and enjoyable read which I could not put it down. I highly recommend it.