adaptation growth
Feb. 8th, 2013 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapI reread/finished Les Misérables mostly for the purpose of being able to say, authoritatively and with actual citations, that where the musical differs from the book I like the musical better, particularly where all things Javert are concerned.
I mean, I also genuinely enjoyed reading it on its own merits, with significant overlap between my very favorite parts and things that are patently unsuitable for adaptation to musical theater, such as the forty-page parenthesis concerning the history and practices of a convent in Paris and the effects generally of enclosure and the contempletive life on practitioners and society. (Actually, I would drop everything and fly to see a show that turned this into a big musical number, but I don't think my presence would make up for the other theatregoers demanding their money back in droves.)
But yes, the dynamic between Javert and Jean Valjean in the book is completely unsuitable for my purposes, which are all porny ones. Book!Javert does not have nearly enough angst, or indeed feelings of any kind, although I am strangely touched by his concern, evidently either repressed or unrealized until he is on the point of offing himself, that prisoners are being docked 10 sous when they drop a thread and this is unfair as it does not affect the quality of the finished cloth. JAVERT YOU DORK, ILU BUT YOU ARE HOPELESS. ♥
I still ship him with book!Valjean, but it's more because Javert is the only one who appreciates him at all because Cosette and Marius are such ungrateful, oblivious meanyheads. Especially Marius, the unbelievable twit. Valjean sort of enters into a bizarre, unsafe, unsexy D/s relationship with him at the end and I am so not into it.
I mean, I also genuinely enjoyed reading it on its own merits, with significant overlap between my very favorite parts and things that are patently unsuitable for adaptation to musical theater, such as the forty-page parenthesis concerning the history and practices of a convent in Paris and the effects generally of enclosure and the contempletive life on practitioners and society. (Actually, I would drop everything and fly to see a show that turned this into a big musical number, but I don't think my presence would make up for the other theatregoers demanding their money back in droves.)
But yes, the dynamic between Javert and Jean Valjean in the book is completely unsuitable for my purposes, which are all porny ones. Book!Javert does not have nearly enough angst, or indeed feelings of any kind, although I am strangely touched by his concern, evidently either repressed or unrealized until he is on the point of offing himself, that prisoners are being docked 10 sous when they drop a thread and this is unfair as it does not affect the quality of the finished cloth. JAVERT YOU DORK, ILU BUT YOU ARE HOPELESS. ♥
I still ship him with book!Valjean, but it's more because Javert is the only one who appreciates him at all because Cosette and Marius are such ungrateful, oblivious meanyheads. Especially Marius, the unbelievable twit. Valjean sort of enters into a bizarre, unsafe, unsexy D/s relationship with him at the end and I am so not into it.
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Date: 2013-02-08 06:31 pm (UTC)Speaking of enclosure, have you read Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede? (Have we talked about this before?)
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Date: 2013-02-08 10:06 pm (UTC)