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 Misérables 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 Misérables—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 Misérables, 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 Misérables can persuade us is true.
Mario Vargas Llosa is a prolific novelist and essayist whose literary criticism includes A Writer's Reality, Letters to a Young Novelist, and studies of Flaubert and Gabriel García Márquez.. One of his books of essays, Making Waves (Penguin), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novels include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, and The Feast of the Goat. Born in Peru, he now divides his time among Lima, London, and Madrid.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Victor Hugo, the Ocean 1
Chapter I. The Divine Stenographer 11
Chapter II. The Dark Vein of Destiny 34 The Law of Chance or the Order of Coincidence 34 The Irresistible Traps 41 The Ambush in the Gorbeau Tenement 43 The Barricade at la Chanvrerie 45 The Paris Sewers 47 Elusive Freedom 52
Chapter III. Touchy Monsters 56 A Character without Qualities 57 The Saint 61 The Just Man 65 A Puritan World 70 The Fanatic 75 An Angel with a Dirty Face 80 Collective Characters 84
Chapter IV. The Great Theater of the World 87 Adjectives to Describe the Show 89 Performance, Beauty, and Life 92 Light and Shadow 95 Sets 96 The Victor at Waterloo 97 Human Putrefaction 98 Life as Fiction 102
Chapter V. Rich, Poor, Leisured, Idle, and Marginal 105 Reformist Idealism 110 The Just 114 A Society Rebuilt 118 The Victims: Confinement and Women 120 A Source of Social Injustice: The Law 122 A Stupid and Cruel Monster 124
Chapter VI. Civilized Barbarians 131 Long Live Death! 132 Slow-Motion Progress 134 Victor Hugo and the Insurrection of 1832 138
Chapter VII. From Heaven Above 146 The Enumeration of the Infinite 148 Attempting the Impossible 154 The Total Novel or the Deicidal Impulse 156
Chapter VIII. The Temptation of the Impossible 165 Notes 179 Index 185
"It is always interesting when a writer of Vargas Llosa's distinction discusses a great novelist, bringing to bear a luminous awareness of the craft of fiction. The Temptation of the Impossible is written with considerable zest, discrimination, and enthusiasm. Raising practical and theoretical points about the art of the novel, Vargas Llosa never loses sight of Hugo's specific achievement. I recommend this book without hesitation."—Victor Brombert, author of Trains of Thought
Victor Brombert
It is always interesting when a writer of Vargas Llosa's distinction discusses a great novelist, bringing to bear a luminous awareness of the craft of fiction. The Temptation of the Impossible is written with considerable zest, discrimination, and enthusiasm. Raising practical and theoretical points about the art of the novel, Vargas Llosa never loses sight of Hugo's specific achievement. I recommend this book without hesitation. — Victor Brombert, author of "Trains of Thought"
