La Tentación de Lo Imposible: Victor Hugo Y Los Miserables / The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables

«Los Miserables es una de esas obras que han hecho desear a m嫳 hombres y mujeres de todas las lenguas y culturas un mundo m嫳 justo, m嫳 racional y m嫳 bello que aquel en el que viv燰n.

Mario Vargas Llosa se adentra en la novela Los Miserables desde la perspectiva del lector agudo, del entusiasta, del creador que sabe c鏔o se construye una gran obra. Encontramos as?los secretos mecanismos que movieron la pluma de Victor Hugo para crear la gran novela rom嫕tica francesa.

La tentaci鏮 de lo imposible no es un libro que trata sobre otro libro. El autor peruano no se deja nublar por las palabras y desvela las claves con las que el franc廥 dej?constancia de su creaci鏮. Nos descubre esas huellas que hablan de un Victor Hugo escritor, pol癃ico y ante todo humano; un personaje m嫳 de la novela que sabe disfrazarse de narrador o de protagonista y que tambi幯 sabe c鏔o desaparecer sin dejar rastro.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's Les Mis廨ables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible, one of the world's great novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa, helps us to appreciate the incredible ambition, power, and beauty of Hugo's masterpiece and, in the process, presents a humane vision of fiction as an alternative reality that can help us imagine a different and better world.

Hugo, Vargas Llosa says, had at least two goals in Les Mis廨ables--to create a complete fictional world and, through it, to change the real world. Despite the impossibility of these aims, Hugo makes them infectious, sweeping up the reader with his energy and linguistic and narrative skill. Les Mis廨ables, Vargas Llosa argues, embodies a utopian vision of literature--the idea that literature can not only give us a supreme experience of beauty, but also make us more virtuous citizens, and even grant us a glimpse of the "afterlife, the immortal soul, God." If Hugo's aspiration to transform individual and social life through literature now seems innocent, Vargas Llosa says, it is still a powerful ideal that great novels like Les Mis廨ables can persuade us is true.