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Zusatztext “Rich and gorgeous. This is the [translation] to read… and if you are flying! just carry it under your arm as you board! or better still! rebook your holiday and go by train! slowly! page by page.” —Jeanette Winterson! The Times (London) “[A] magnificent story… marvelously captured in this new unabridged translation by Julie Rose.” — The Denver Post “A new translation by Julie Rose of Hugo’s behemoth classic that is as racy and current and utterly arresting as it should be.” — Buffalo News (editor’s choice) “Vibrant and readable! idiomatic and well suited to a long narrative! [Julie Rose’s new translation of Les Miserables ] is closer to the captivating tone Hugo would have struck for his own contemporaries.” —Diane Johnson “A lively! dramatic! and wonderfully readable translation of one of the greatest 19th-century novels.” —Alison Lurie “Some of us may have read Les Miserables back in the day! but… between Gopnik and Rose! you’ll get two introductions that will offer you all the pleasures of your college instruction with none of the pain.” — The Agony Column Informationen zum Autor Victor Hugo (1802-85), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today’s most popular world classics: Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , as well as other works, including The Toilers of the Sea and The Man Who Laughs . Hugo was elected to the Académie Française in 1841. As a statesman, he was named a Peer of France in 1845. He served in France’s National Assemblies in the Second Republic formed after the 1848 revolution, and in 1851 went into self-imposed exile upon the ascendance of Napoleon III, who restored France’s government to authoritarian rule. Hugo returned to France in 1870 after the proclamation of the Third Republic. Julie Rose ’s acclaimed translations include Alexandre Dumas’s The Knight of Maison-Rouge and Racine’s Phèdre , as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN medallion for translation and the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize. Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate , and editor of the Library of America anthology Americans in Paris . He writes on various subjects for The New Yorker and has written introductions to works by Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, and Alain-Fournier. Klappentext Pulsing with energy! the first major unabridged translation" Les Misrables" in 30 years brings remarkable clarity and depth to Victor Hugo's popular masterpiece. Sweeping readers from the French provinces to the back alleys of Paris! Julie Rose's brilliant new rendition brings fresh vivacity to Hugo's sublime classic. I. Monsieur Myriel In 1815, Monsieur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was bishop of Digne.1 He was an elderly man of about seventy-five and he had occupied the seat of Digne since 1806. There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell—not even on the background. Yet it may well serve some purpose, if only in the interests of precision, to jot down here the rumors and gossip that had circulated about him the moment he first popped up in the diocese. True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do. Monsieur Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Aix parliament, a member of the noblesse de robe.2 They reckoned his father had put him down to inherit his position and so had married him off very early in the piece when he was only eighteen or twenty, as they used to do quite a lot in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, married o...
