Summary: Victor Hugo on Things That Matter

With Victor Hugo on Things That Matter, edited by Marva Barnett (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2009), English-speaking readers easily engage with the thoughts, feelings, and art work of a literary genius whose ideas still resonate today—and with the beauty and power of his French. A politically and personally engaged poet, playwright, and novelist, Hugo tackled tough topics: poverty, crime, tyranny and exile, liberty and democracy, peace and revolution. He cared for common people in ways that echo through current arguments, such as those in the health care debate. At the same time, he expressed his belief in love and God and unveiled his personal tragedies and deepest emotions in ways that help readers better understand themselves. How did he endure his wife’s affair with his best friend? How did he go on after his beloved nineteen-year-old daughter drowned?

In the tradition of How Proust Can Change Your Life, Victor Hugo on Things That Matter brings a brilliant writer’s inspirational ideas and surprising drawings to a wider public. Each of the thirteen chapters (“On Love and Passion,” “On Humanity, Progress, and Peace,” and so on) contains accessible, insightful English introductions to the topic and to each poem, prose excerpt, love letter, speech, watercolor. Anyone who studied French in college can find, through Hugo, a new pleasure in French.

Hugo’s work, so modern in vision, still compels. His arguments against the death penalty are those used today. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame perennially inspires filmmakers. Les Misérables remains a popular favorite, both as a novel and as the world’s longest running musical (www.lesmis.com). But these are just a few waves in the Hugolian sea of ideas. Hugo called geniuses “men-oceans,” saying that looking into their souls was tantamount to plumbing the depths of the ocean. With this book, readers see directly into the soul of the man who wrote Les Mis and imagined Quasimodo—and discover what he has to say about how they might want to live their lives.