Sometimes reading a well written novel can help us love people with more compassion.
There is just something about the way stirring words describe our struggles and experiences that gets through to us.
I’m still really enjoying Julie Rose’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables…
Here is a penetratingly dark description of the villan…
Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, rickety man, who looked sick but was as fit as a fiddle; his deceitfulness started there.
Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was the element of his existence; a divided conscience leads to a disjointed life. Thenardier belonged to that variety of marauding camp followers of which we have spoken, a two-bit hustler, selling to some, stealing from others, and rolling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always attaching himself to the victorious army.
He resented the human race in general and bore within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those people who are always getting revenge, who blame anyone in the vicinity them for everything which has befallen them, and who are always ready to throw upon the first person who comes to hand the sum total of the deceptions, the disappintments, and the calamities of their lives,–when all this leaven was stirred up in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to the person who came under his wrath at such a time!
And this description of the poor, abused orphan girl Cosette
Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. Cosette was thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost lifeless with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people. As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter. This child’s whole person, the way she moved, her attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her slightest gesture, expressed and translated a single idea,–fear.
Here Hugo relates how easily young people befriend each other
In a few days, Marius was friends with Courfeyrac. Youth is the season when bones are swiftly mended and wounds rapidly healed. They did not ask each other many questions. They did not even think to. At that age faces say it all right away. Words are pointless. There is a kind of young man you could describe as having a face that talks. One look and you know each other.