At 1400 pages, is this really worth reading? Don't see /lit/ talk about it much

>>24510758 (OP)
I don't know--but the Iranians love it--so there's gotta be something there.

>>24510758 (OP)
i rather just watch the play

>>24510758 (OP)
>More than a quarter of the novel—by one count 955 of 2,783 pages—is devoted to essays that argue a moral point or display Hugo's encyclopedic knowledge but do not advance the plot, nor even a subplot, a method Hugo used in such other works as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Toilers of the Sea. One biographer noted, "The digressions of genius are easily pardoned".[11]

>The topics Hugo addresses include cloistered religious orders, the construction of the Paris sewers, argot, and the street urchins of Paris. The one about convents he titles "Parenthesis" to alert the reader to its irrelevance to the storyline.[12]

>Hugo devotes another 19 chapters (Volume II, Book I) to an account—and meditation on the place in history—of the Battle of Waterloo, the battlefield of which Hugo visited in 1861 and where he finished writing the novel.

>>24510793
That's awesome. I'd like to know how the Paris sewers were built.

>>24510793
>30% of the book is Cetology tier chapters
I fucking kneel

>>24510758 (OP)
>this is 1400 pages
>Hunchback of Notre Dame is 940 pages
>even Toilers of the Sea hits 600 in some editions

wtf, this French faggot just kept churning out doorstoppers. Did he get paid by the word like Dickens?

Yeah, the Signet classics translation is written so that you can fly through it, I was doing 100 pages per night at one point.

>>24510758 (OP)
>>24510793
The random essay diversions are the best part.

>>24510758 (OP)
I'm glad I read it and I was very moved by it, by I was at a point in life in which I really had a soft spot for sprawling historical fiction doorstoppers with an epic feel to them and Christian or Christian adjacent moral messaging
I still have positive feelings about it but I don't see myself ever going back to it aside for maybe the Waterloo chapter
I would not recommend it to a plot fag
>>24510813
I think melville would erudition in mobile dick is more purposeful and compelling than what Hugo does

>>24510758 (OP)
No.
Read The New Roman Empire instead

>>24510793
based

>>24510758 (OP)
J'aime ce roman !

Yeah it's epic. That whole hundred-page or more on Waterloo is deffo a highlight. The whole book is great, thoughsoeverbeit

>>24510842
His books were serialised, so yes.

>>24510800
That part is pretty interesting, worth the read. The other digressions less so.

>>24510793
But when Melville does this you all basedface

>>24510758 (OP)
Just go with the tv series
Depardieu + Malkovich

>C'est... un... dan-ge-reux... ré-ci-di-vsite
epic

>>24510800
piling bones. letting shit flow inbetween