Who was Victor Hugo? An ocean! is Vargas Llosa's first, emphatically astonished answer. A mountain, a continent: How else could one encapsulate his vast novel work Les Misérables, which towers with contrasts, contradictions, and extremes? And right in the middle of it, the excessively sprawling, thunderous narrator from his Olympus, who is not identical to the author yet unmistakably bears his traits. Thus begins Vargas Llosa's grand essay with a vivid portrait of the author as a titan, as a "divine stenographer." Vargas Llosa approaches the monstrous pre-modern and timelessly seductive nature of the novel in eight chapters and steps. What is it that this work, with all its exuberance and its flaws or peculiarities that are now so visible to the modern eye, has lost none of its allure after more than one hundred and fifty years? Vargas Llosa.