Les Misérables

Hugo did not write a novel about Paris. He wrote Paris as a novel — the sewers, the barricades, the convents, the slums, the bridges. Jean Valjean's transformation from convict to saint plays out against a city in upheaval, where student revolutionaries build barricades from furniture and die for ideals that will take another generation to realize. The book is enormous, digressive, and unapologetic about it. Hugo interrupts his plot to deliver forty-page essays on the Battle of Waterloo, the Paris sewer system, and the nature of mercy. It should not work. It works magnificently. Les Misérables remains the great novel of compassion — a book that argues, across 1,200 pages, that people are capable of change and that justice without mercy is just another form of cruelty.