Many years ago my mother received in the mail, every month or so, a volume of the "Readers' Digest Condensed Books" series. Each volume contained abridgments of recent books. I never quite grasped, back then, the reasoning by which one might justify reading a shortened version of a longer work. Jim Reimann's adaptation of Victor Hugo's monumental Les Miserables fails to put to rest those childhood doubts that I have carried into adulthood.

In a brief introduction, Reimann offers something of a rationale for his adaptation. In his view, Hugo's novel is one that should be read by many people, but "due to its great length and to language that has become increasingly difficult to understand over time, few people in our current generation have endeavored to read it." A moment later, though, Reimann asserts that Les Miserables is a "masterpiece" with a "writing style virtually unmatched by today's writers." Despite its beauty, he goes on, "much of the main storyline gets lost among its many tedious portions." Tedium, for Reimann, includes Hugo's entire detailed intro

duction of the Bishop of Digne, significant development of characters such as Fantine, his fascinating digressions, such as that on the Paris sewer system (which adds inestimable import to Jean Valjean's flight through the sewers), and many other elements that make Les Miserables a panorama of France in the early 1800s.

This is the touchstone of all adaptations of Les Miserables, musical or cinematic: to turn Javert, the tenacious respecter of authority, "that savage in the service of civilization," into the villain of the piece is to deprive the novel of its dynamite, to point the finger at a single policeman instead of at the system he serves.

Graham Robb offers Robert Louis Stevenson's assessment of the novel's power:

The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable . . . The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels.

Reimann has also "attempted to maintain the beautiful pictures that Victor Hugo masterfully painted with the words of his day -- but in a way that today's readers can better understand." Despite this attempt, Reimann's Les Miserables reads like a plot summary, and where Hugo paints in a rich chi

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Approximate Word count = 945
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)