Oh yes, it took me some time to get used to the whiplash of going from cinematic, tense action scenes bam into essays -- I have to read those sections with different mental settings, and the suddenness of the change in required reading protocols can be exhausting. And I definitely think he could have stood to streamline the essays a bit! (and I would cut Marius' overwrought love poetry entirely, oh god. Much harder to get through than Waterloo. :P)
But oh my goodness. A better novel, if he had separated the main story out? Perhaps. But IMO a much smaller and less successful book. It's an amazing thing, what Hugo's done here, and it's much more than a novel in the usual sense. He's managed to collapse the foreground into the background and the background into the foreground without losing sight of the relative scope -- to have a story where the small and large are equally important but never out of proportion -- and it's an amazing, amazing accomplishment. I argue with him a lot, but. An amazing accomplishment.
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Oh yes, it took me some time to get used to the whiplash of going from cinematic, tense action scenes bam into essays -- I have to read those sections with different mental settings, and the suddenness of the change in required reading protocols can be exhausting. And I definitely think he could have stood to streamline the essays a bit! (and I would cut Marius' overwrought love poetry entirely, oh god. Much harder to get through than Waterloo. :P)
But oh my goodness. A better novel, if he had separated the main story out? Perhaps. But IMO a much smaller and less successful book. It's an amazing thing, what Hugo's done here, and it's much more than a novel in the usual sense. He's managed to collapse the foreground into the background and the background into the foreground without losing sight of the relative scope -- to have a story where the small and large are equally important but never out of proportion -- and it's an amazing, amazing accomplishment. I argue with him a lot, but. An amazing accomplishment.