The whole of Hugo's novel in one edition-all five volumes, unabridged, from the bishop's candlesticks to the last word spoken in the Rue de l'Homme-Armé. Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for a stolen loaf and comes out with a yellow passport that makes him unemployable; a bishop gives away his silver to save him, and the rest of the book is what a man does with that debt over four decades.
Around him Hugo builds the largest canvas in nineteenth-century fiction. Fantine sells her hair, her teeth and finally herself for a daughter kept by innkeepers who are bleeding her. Javert, born in a prison and incapable of imagining mercy, pursues Valjean across a lifetime until an act of kindness destroys him more completely than any defeat. Cosette grows up. Marius falls in love and nearly starves for politics. And in June 1832 a handful of students build a barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie that no one in Paris comes to defend, where Gavroche sings while collecting cartridges from the dead.
Hugo interrupts himself constantly-on Waterloo, on the sewers of Paris, on convent life, on argot-and those digressions are the book, not delays in it. Complete means complete: they are all here. This new translation carries the whole of it, roughly sixty hours, in a single edition rather than split across volumes.
