Review – The Temptation of the Impossible

Posted on February 5th, 2010

The Temptation of the Impossible:

Victor Hugo and Les Misérables

Mario Vargas Llosa

John King, translator

Princeton University Press

232 pages

Hardcover $24.95

978-0-691-13111-5

Here, in this compelling book, readers can enjoy the fascinating encounter between two literary giants: Mario Vargas Llosa and Victor Hugo. Intriguing and entertaining in its approach—part literary criticism, part biography, and part personal essay—The Temptation of the Impossible is Vargas Llosa’s consistently perceptive tribute to Hugo’s Les Misérables. For Vargas Llosa—Peruvian novelist, journalist, and literary critic—Hugo’s 1862 novel is a brilliant if not always flawlessly executed portrayal of “a world blazing with extreme misfortune, love, courage, happiness, and vile deeds.”

Hugo’s development of characters and themes are central to Vargas Llosa’s analysis, but for the Peruvian critic it is Hugo’s narrative style that remains essential to appreciating the novel. The narrator, says Vargas Llosa, is most remarkable for his “omniscience, omnipotence, exuberance, visibility, and egomania. He knows everything that happens during the time of the novel, those eighteen years that begin on an October evening in 1815, when the ex-convict Jean Valjean enters the inhospitable town of Digne, and end that night in 1833 when Jean Valjean dies in his small house in the Rue de L’Homme Armé, with Marius and Cosette by his bedside, in the glow of Bishop Myriel’s candlesticks.”

Vargas Llosa boldly though not wholly persuasively argues that a great novel—especially Hugo’s gargantuan tale of Valjean, Cosette, Marius, Javert, and the other characters—can make “us feel dissatisfied with what exists, and gives us an appetite for unreality that can influence our lives in many different ways and affect the wider world.” Many literary critics will disagree that novels function as catalysts for changing an individual (much less the world), yet Vargas Llosa argues so passionately that even dissenting critics will admire his zealous and thorough reasoning.

Hugo’s novel, while extraordinarily popular in the nineteenth century, unfortunately attracts few contemporary readers. It is perhaps too long and discursive. Many potential readers, in fact, are more familiar with the spectacular musical than with Hugo’s book; the Schönberg-Boublil box-office phenomenon opened in September 1980 in Paris for an eight-week season and has shown little signs of fading from the limelight. Nevertheless, for any student of world literature who is interested in an important and hugely readable, one-stop critical analysis of Hugo’s canonical novel, Vargas Llosa’s fascinating book is the perfect destination for an evening or two. Readers may not be persuaded of the greatness of Les Misérables, but they will be entertained and edified by Vargas Llosa’s infectious enthusiasm.

Tags: Book Readers, Candlesticks, Catalysts, Cosette, Exuberance, Javert, Jean Valjean, John King, Literary Critic, Literary Criticism, Literary Critics, Literary Giants, Many Different Ways, Mario Vargas Llosa, Narrative Style, Omnipotence, Personal Essay, Princeton University Press, Unreality, Victor Hugo
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