A few years back I re read Les Miserables, the unabridged forever long version. Like many classsics one gets a much different spin on them than when forced to read them back in school.
In a nutshell the story is Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread for his starving nephews. Gets caught and spends the next 20 years rowing on a prison ship. He gets out on parole, has an epiphany to do good works, jumps parole, changes identity and becomes a do-gooder pillar of society. While a consumed RULE OF LAW fanatic, Inspector Javert, chases him down for the rest of their lives. Spoiler. At the end Javert realizes both he and the RULE OF LAW have gone wrong in the lifelong chase. He cannot live with the fact that his entire life and worldview has been WRONG, so he jumps to his death into the Seine as Jean Valjean walks into the sunset. I hear in the musical they kill him off too at the end.
What’s different reading it of late as a much older and wiser person, is how it relates to politics in general, Left and Right, and American politics specifically. Take a look at the Tea Party, or the NRA, or the Evangelical Right or today’s Republican Party. Notice how angry, nasty, selfish, irrational and wrong they are about so much. Add the definition of conservative to that mix – avoidance of change – and any divergence from their worldview is the untenable admission that they have been forever wrong. But there is one option. This is a nation of rivers. And bridges over rivers.
Speaking of classics, I just finished THE IDIOT. Found it much like Catcher in the Rye. A kind, gentle, emotional soul doing the right things to find society deems them mentally unstable and puts them away. A crucifixion of sorts. Hear! Here! For Victor Hugo bucking that reality. Which is what makes good movies.