Having Been to the Galleys and Back

At an almost completely four month stint of living alongside Jean Valjean/M. Fauchlevant/M. Madeleine/etc etc, I have finally reached the end of the road. It was a very tragic and divine parting of ways, with the final scene depicted in the vein of a Chiaroscuro painting.

Hugo's characters are incredibly black and white. It is easy to hate the coal-hearted villains, but it was much more difficult for me to swallow the naivety and carelessness of the innocent (especially in Cosette, after her marriage - so Audrey Hepburn of her to be so blinded by love as to throw all other, more crushingly important and urgent matters out of mind). Even so, you cannot help but to love and admire them, and in the end, it is all resolved in the most pleasant of ways anyway, which is good, as I would not have liked to have ended a novel such as this on some kind of open ended or doomed situation, as modern writing may encourage. I don't mind that the characters are ideals, or that they are sometimes two-dimensional. I love Jean Valjean for his innate goodness, Fantine for her will, and Cosette for her innocence (Marius, on the other hand, was rather forgettable and lackluster...he is good, but his purity is unconvincingly adolescent).

The book for me was a welcome cliche of an escape. For moments at a time, I was not on the el on the way to a dead-end job at the Marriott, nor was I pondering all of the failures in my current state of affairs. It was, possibly for the first time (at least, in terms of causing me to think about it as it happened), that experience that people always describe reading as; an experience removed from reality, allowing me access to not so much actions and setting, but direct, weighted emotions that tied my real anxieties and happinesses in some kind of moving, full-circle way. To intermittently be Jean Valjean for four months was somewhat of a blessing, at this point in my life.

And now, time for me to make my way onward as other literary hero(in)es. Seeing as I have some sort of pattern going with classics, to (more) modern, and so forth, I will come back to an era closer to today. One of my best friends gifted to me numero quarante-huit, Choke by Chuck Palahniuk this past December (which, I am grateful for, as I do not have favorable ideas of him, and therefore would not have been happy to purchase the book myself), so I figure now is as good a time as any to test my thoughts on this author. Can I just say that Lullaby was atrocious, and almost unreadable? Disgusted. Still, I will give him another shot, as I have heard some good things about Choke (whether or not I trust their literary merit is up for grabs). I am expecting this read to go extremely quickly, by standards of his writing style.

On a side note, I have recently also acquired (among other books on the list, which will not be named until it is their turn to be read) The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok based off of an interesting review I read in some women's magazine I fail to remember now, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer (LOOOOVE!!!)'s Tree of Codes, a rendering/artistic take on Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (which I also intend on reading, once I can get my hands on it). I must confess I spent an absurd amount of money on the Safran Foer book, as it is a first edition, and am still hesitant to unwrap its original wrapping as if it were something holy. I will be making time to read these in between 1001 list projects.