The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables - Hardcover

Llosa, Mario Vargas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691131112 ISBN 13: 9780691131115

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2007

Synopsis

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 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.

About this title

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025) was a Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian 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, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novels include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Feast of the Goat, and The War of the End of the World.

From the Back Cover

"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

From the Inside Flap

"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 ofTrains of Thought

Reviews

As "a masterpiece of impossibility," Les Miserables provoked the ire of conservative critic Alphonse de Lamartine. But for Peruvian novelist Vargas Llosa, it is the very impossibilities Hugo creates that endow this work with its enduring imaginative value. By defying the limits of merely factual history, Vargas Llosa insists, Hugo transports his readers to a better world--a world of moral heroism and spiritual redemption. The self-sacrificing Jean Valjean, the Christ-like Monseigneur Bievenu, the angelic Cosette--these and other enchanting characters join the godlike narrator in beckoning the reader toward utopian ideals of justice and perfection, even as they obscure the tawdry complexities of nineteenth-century France. Vargas Llosa probes these ugly complexities--establishing, for instance, that the rebels that Hugo romanticizes for ascending the barricades actually espoused a wide range of incompatible causes. Yet Vargas Llosa discerns genius in the French novelist's artistic transmutation of such leaden terrestrial events into a golden utopian fantasy. Readers who cherish Hugo's powerful novel will value this insightful study. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691131112
• ISBN 13: 9780691131115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208