Recommendations
Books Like Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Works that believe in the possibility of human transformation and are not embarrassed by that belief
Hugo's refusal to be ironical about Valjean's transformation is the most unfashionable thing about Les Misérables and the most important. These works share that same willingness to believe that a human being can be changed by grace, kindness, or love — without the author protecting themselves with irony.
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Buy on AmazonNotre-Dame de Paris
by Victor Hugo
The earlier Hugo epic — the same totalizing historical ambition applied to medieval Paris; Notre-Dame de Paris shows what the Hugo historical novel can do when its subject is the past; Les Misérables shows what it can do when its subject is the immediate past and the present
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Buy on AmazonCrime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian descendant — Dostoevsky read Hugo in Siberia and the transformation of Raskolnikov by Sonya's grace is the Valjean-Myriel transformation transposed into Orthodox theology; both novels ask what it takes to transform a soul
- 3
Buy on AmazonOliver Twist
by Charles Dickens
The English parallel — Dickens's novel of the orphan in the criminal underworld is the same humanitarian project as Les Misérables in a Victorian London setting; the two together define the 19th-century social novel of poverty and injustice
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian theological continuation — Dostoevsky's final novel asks the same question as Les Misérables (whether grace can transform a human life) in a more philosophically complex way; Alyosha is the Bishop Myriel figure expanded into a full protagonist
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Buy on AmazonNorth and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
The English social novel of the same industrial concerns — Gaskell's 1855 novel of the conflict between industrial capitalism and human dignity shares Hugo's humanitarian socialism without his epic scale; a focused version of the same argument
- 6Buy on Amazon
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas père
The popular counterpart from the same decade — where Hugo gives us the man transformed by mercy, Dumas gives us the man transformed by vengeance; both are melodramas of extreme moral transformation, but in opposite directions
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Buy on AmazonQuo Vadis
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Polish continuation of the Hugo formula — Sienkiewicz's 1896 novel of Roman persecution of Christians uses the same combination of historical spectacle, moral melodrama, and transformative grace that Hugo pioneered in Les Misérables
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Buy on AmazonLe Père Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
The Balzacian counter-text — the same Paris, the same period, seen by Balzac's cold anatomizing eye instead of Hugo's warm humanitarian one; comparing the two gives the full range of possible responses to 19th-century Parisian society
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