I am reading the recent translation by Julie Rose. This is an unexpurgated edition, almost 1200 pages. I am a slow reader so I used to feel overhwelmed by very long texts. But not now. The book teaches me patience as it pervades and shapes my thoughts, providing another lodestar beside my own work. Last night I saw an extraordinary production of the musical by the Youth Musical Theater Company, kids, wonderful. (If you're fast, you can catch the last performance today, Sunday August 2, at the Julia Morgan Theater on College in Berkeley.) In the program notes the director tells us the young actors saw the relevance of the work to today's conditions right away. It's what we are headed back into, more homelessness, more destitution, the sorry state of the "Western World" before labor unions had any power.
For writers, I ask this general question, are you being asked to keep your books under 250 pages? What will happen not only to literature but to ideas and the scope of the imagination with these new rules that come, by the way, not from the souls and hearts of writers or editors but from the marketing department?
These are not disconnected subjects. Les Miserables is truly a revolutionary work not just through its subject matter but through the sheer enormity of its vision. Let's start a movement to stop downsizing our minds!