The Temptation of the Impossible

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'sLes Misérablesis neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. InThe 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 inLes Misérables--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 Misérables, 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 likeLes Misérablescan persuade us is true.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a prolific novelist and essayist whose literary criticism includes "A Writer's Reality, Letters to a Young Novelist", and studies of Flaubert and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.. One of his books of essays, "Making Waves" (Penguin), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novels include "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto", and "The Feast of the Goat". Born in Peru, he now divides his time among Lima, London, and Madrid.