Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

It’s impossible to love this book. It’s impossible to not love this book. It was written in 1866 when Victor Hugo had been exiled to the Channel Islands, Guernsey and Jersey. The story takes place in those islands in the early 1800’s. 

It is the most unique novel I have ever read. It is a blizzard of words. Hugo describes places and things and people in almost endless detail. He can spend ten pages writing about the darkness of night or twenty pages on the nature of ocean storms. He spends the first forty-seven pages describing the islands and the people who live there.

He creates a character who has spent his entire lifetime choosing to be honest and virtuous with only one purpose in mind: to achieve the respect and admiration needed to enable him to get away with a monstrously evil deed. Hugo’s imagination coupled with the enormity of his language results in an amazing emotional engagement with the text. You are there. He puts you there. The words and the words and the words take you to a deeper level than just the words.

The story is Homeric. Hugo’s Odysseus suffers for three months (as opposed to twenty years) living on rocks in the middle of the ocean. It is also about romance at a time when romantic love was only beginning to emerge as something beyond the bondage of arranged marriages for convenience, politics, and wealth.

If you read this book, you will have more than just a meaningful experience. It will always be with you and you will never be sorry that it is part of your experience with books. It is said that when Victor Hugo died in 1885 two million people lined the streets of Paris. You will know why.

Laurence Lieberman