It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in
France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the
great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean
Valjean-a man unjustly imprisoned baffled by destiny and hounded by his nemesis the
magnificently realized ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert-Hugo achieves the sort
of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. Les Misérables
is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all
literature an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry and a vital
drama-highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications-of
the redemption of one human being.
![9780375403170 - Hugo Victor Les Miserables Introduction by Peter Washington [With Ribbon Marker]](https://ean-shopping.de/pp/ean/9780/9780375403170_1.jpg "9780375403170 - Hugo Victor Les Miserables Introduction by Peter Washington [With Ribbon Marker]")
