Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
In His Nightmare City
By Graham Robb
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by John King
Princeton University Press, 196 pp., $24.95
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo's epic tale of an escaped convict and an abandoned woman, which Tolstoy called 'the greatest of all novels,' nearly vanished into the skies over Paris in June 1848. Four months after the popular revolution that brought it to power, in a desperate attempt to deal with hunger and unemployment in Paris, the French government introduced mass conscription. Riots broke out on June 22, and Hugo and his family left their apartment in the Place des Vosges, which was close to the heart of the insurrection.
Review, 3798 words
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