Less Misérables, please.

My wife has been reading Victor Hugo's timeless classic, Les Misérables, in translation from le français. And when I call it timeless, I mean that it takes for freaking ever to read. 

She's never shied away from long books. She has read the uncut Count of Monte Cristo multiple times, and that thing is a cinder block. On the other hand, War and Peace she never made it through. She liked the peace but couldn't stand the war. (This is not just a joke -- she isn't much interested in military history, and the Tolstoy wasn't kidding when he gave war top billing in that book.)

She hasn't given up on Les Mis yet, although if another freaking rebellion starts she might just. I think she's hoping that Javert will just shoot Valjean in the head and be done with it. THE END, ALREADY. "When you called the book Les Misérables, I didn't think you were talking about the readers!"

I feel sorry for her. I had a class in French literature in college, and while the teacher was very kind, she was really a professor of languages, not literature. So when she gave us two weeks to read Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (in English -- Quasimodo's book), she quickly realized that it was a mistake. That book is 448 pages long in the Dover Thrift edition -- and if you know Dover, you know they provide the books at bargain prices because the print is tiny. Saves paper. I did my best, but there is an enormous section early on where Hugo describes every square inch of the cathedral, and I thought it was going to kill me. 

Hugo is verbose, but we know that going in. I guess it is fine if you have a broader view of what you like in books than I or my wife do. That is, if the book is going to have a lot of military stuff, my wife's going to lose interest. If it turns into a love story where the drama is driven by everyone being stupid, I'm out. And I'm not just picking on French books here. Dr. Zhivago lost me in a scene where characters are arguing over political theory while digging a train out of the snow (if I recall correctly -- it was some years ago). But I and my wife both loved The Brothers Karamazov.

The big question you may be asking is: Did these guys get paid by the word? Or by the pound? And the answer is no. Well, Dickens got paid by the word, and sometimes it shows. Apparently Hugo did not, but his deal for the rights to Les Mis made him the highest-paid writer ever at the time, and so I'm sure he felt he had to deliver something weighty. And boy howdy, did he! 

It's funny that in the modern era, where we don't have patience for such big books, we also don't have interest in short stories. The short story form was very popular in the United States until the seventies, when it started to fade. General interest magazines stopped publishing fiction -- a 1950s Ladies' Home Journal is packed with short stories; a 1990s one, hardly any. I suppose television killed the short story, but it took forty years to do it. 

I don't wrote a lot of shoet stories, but I do have my novels. A reader may find them punishing, but never as punishing as Les Mis. Why? Because my books would never run 1,376 pages in a Dover Thrift Edition, that's why! Three times longer than the Hunchback! C'est de la cruauté!