Biographies

 For a person like me who reads a lot, it’s not that easy to find a book that impresses me so much I want to write about it. There might not be so many titles, but there is a genre (if we could call it that) of books that I love to read, and that rarely disappoints me. I am talking about biographies. On average, yearly I read about 4 or 5 biographies. Some of them are biographies of famous people like Nelson Mandela, Queen Victoria, or Johnny Cash, and some are just incredible stories of “common people.” There are many reasons why I love to read biographies.

Life is writing the most interesting stories. Just like many other book lovers, I love a book with a good plot, interesting turns, and many ups and downs. And, people’s lives can sometimes be more interesting and more suspenseful than any novel. Stories of some ordinary people like Holocaust survivors, defectors from North Korea, or missionaries in a faraway country are sometimes full of incredible events, and experiences. Some of them are sad and hard, but there are also beautiful ones. It is incredible to read what people can do to others, but it is equally incredible to see what people can survive, overcome, and forgive. Stories about the lives of famous people, especially those from the distant past, are also full of unbelievable details that we know little about.

Furthermore, biographies are not just books about one person. They tell a story about a certain time and society in which they lived. Through them, we can learn so much about the history of a certain place in a specific time of history. For example, the story of a girl who fled North Korea has taught me so much about that closed country, its history, and society about which we don’t know much. The biography of a young woman from Nepal opened my eyes to the horrors of sexual slavery. In the biography of Queen Victoria, I learned so much about the era that was named after her.

Finally, the history we learn through biographies does not consist only of facts, numbers, and years. We gain a far better picture of a society, circumstances, human reasoning, mentality, and relationships between people.

Biographies also give us a remarkable insight into someone’s life. It is especially fascinating in the case of famous people we mostly see in their public roles or at least in the light that media or history want to portray them. Sometimes the famous people themselves are the ones that created the public image that differs from who they really are. Of course, some biographies are well written, and some are not. The good ones are the ones that have more than just facts. They also give us testimonies and insights from a person’s friends, colleagues, and family members. In that way, they portray a much more vivid, colorful, and in-depth picture of that person. I love to see who are these people that ruled the world, won many hearts, who are admired by many, or feared by the masses.

These are just some of the reasons why I love biographies. I recently had a conversation with my husband, and he shared that e person can only read so many books on a certain topic. After a while, things start to become repetitive. However, biographies are always new. Regardless of the similarities, there are no two equal lives lived at the same time in history under the same circumstances and with the same experiences.

 

Les Miserables

 I mentioned in the introduction to this blog that I wanted to write about the books I read, so here it is. I want to remind everybody I am not a literary critic and this is just my personal reflection. The book I want to write is Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. At the very beginning, I can say that this is one of the best books I have ever read.

It is interesting how Hugo chose the name of this novel - Les Misérables - which means the pitiful ones. One of the questions that pose upon us at the very beginning is: who are these Misérables? This is a story of one man, former convict Jean Valjean, who returns to society after 19 years of prison. He is then changed because of the grace he received. Still, for the rest of his life, he struggles with his past that constantly haunts him. Should we consider him, He is a kind of outcast hiding under false names for most of his life, trying to redeem for his past and fighting his feelings to make righteous decisions regardless of the price. Should we consider him as the one to be pitied? Or, is the pitiful one inspector Javert who did not understand mercy and grace, couldn’t tell the difference between human and God’s righteousness and whose whole life lost its footing when a man whom he considered dangerous and cruel criminal saves his life? Javerts lets him go free despite everything he used to believe. Maybe we should pity the poor abandoned children of Paris who had nobody to care for them.  Those were boys and girls left to tend for themselves at an early age, living, or better said hiding, in the black holes of a big city. Maybe it is the daughter of thief Threnadier who was used by her own father for his schemes. She fell in love with the only young man who ever showed her mercy and for whom she sacrifices her life. All these are characters whose life stories are intermingled in this novel. Maybe, in a way, they all are Les Misérables.

Besides that, there are several specific things in this book that had made a profound impression on me. First, it’s Hugo’s style of writing. It seems like every few chapters he interrupts the plot and moves into some completely different world, to some other place, people, and circumstances. You follow the plot and, all of a sudden, you find yourself reading the description of the Battle of Waterloo, or about political and social unrest in France in the early 1900s, the history of different monastic orders and their meaning in modern society. You read about the life of street children of Paris or the history and development of the Paris sewage system. At first glance, all these narrating seems completely unrelated. But, as Hugo develops the story and adds new characters, each of these digressions helps us to get a clearer picture and to better understand interactions between characters or social circumstances of the time. I have to admit, on several occasions I wanted to skip these descriptions (especially The Battle of Waterloo because I understood nothing about the movement of English and French armies). But, I  was also reminded of important history lessons and googled the history of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the first half of 19. century so I could better understand who was he talking about. Each time, Hugo would bring us back to the story and give it a new dimension.

Second, throughout the book, there are spread social elements. From the beginning to the end, the author is dissecting the society he lives in with a special critical review of its social insensibility. This is especially pronounced in the way society relates to the poor and the description of the lives of street children. Not only that, we come across criticism of the society that has become numb to the suffering of others and which puts its self-righteousness above mercy. We see Jean Valjean sentenced to prison for stealing bread to feed his sister’s family. Street children found by police would be arrested and nobody cared if they were hungry, thirsty or if they had someplace to spend the night. The only thing that mattered was that they did not disturb the public. And, convicts in chains, on their way to prison, had to walk two times longer route through Paris so they would not walk the same streets as the king on his daily outing from the palace. God forbid the king should see such an obnoxious scene.

And finally, I am convinced Hugo had true, deep faith in God. We can see that from the very beginning of the book in the description of the bishop who showed mercy and grace to Jean Valjean. We see it in a personal metamorphosis of the main protagonist. We see it in the description of historic events such as the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon as those in which God had his sovereign rule as well as in many other small details that point to deep Christian believes. The man was a believer. Or, if he was not, he definitely understood Christianity way better than many people who consider themselves believers.

Maybe it is this last two points that made me love this book so much. Not the plot itself as much as Hugo’s way of thinking we can find on the pages of this book. Although we have to consider many things in this novel in the socio-economic and historic context of his time, many of his thesis and points made me think about our modern society. We may have developed as a society, but we still deal with the same issues in different forms. Regardless of the revolutions and wars, development of industry, medicine, science, a society itself, we still encounter greed, revenge, lack of compassion, and superficial religion trying to disguise as true faith, but also truly changed and transformed lives like the life of Jean Valjean.