Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo

By Alexandre Dumas

Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d'If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

This was the only book on the list that I've read before, because the prompt explicitly required it.  Although I have other, shorter, favorite books, I'd happened to have recently re-read those when the list came out, and I knew I'd have two weeks traveling that I could spend on a nice thick doorstopper.  I've read Count a few times already, and I was really looking forward to re-reading it.  Well, this time, I got five chapters in and had to put it away.  Even though I knew what was coming, and it wasn't a surprise in any way, for some reason the destruction of all of Edmond's hopes on his wedding day just really upset me.  I had to switch to Sherlock Holmes for a few days before I had the strength to continue.

I know this sounds incredibly snotty, but I do get new things out of it every time I re-read it.  Partly because it's so fucking long, there's probably like whole pages I've skipped and never noticed.  Last time I remember thinking that we spent a lot of time going over Benedetto's storyline, which I barely noticed this time around.  This reading had me way focused on the Count's bizarre belief that God was guiding him (because God loves REVENGE too? Actually it probably does) and this whole thing he had about people "deserving" happiness, depending on whether they had suffered a lot.  Also, my perennial gripe about how long we spend on Albert and Franz and the Rome saga, which I ALWAYS find boring and out of place, as a very long meander through a (frankly uninteresting) side character's perspective.  Come on, we have REVENGE waiting!

I also ended up re-watching the 2002 movie version, which does a yeoman's job compressing a thousand page book into a comprehensible two and a half hour movie, and ends up squashing the Haydee, Mercedes, and Albert stories, so Haydee disappears, Albert becomes the Count's biological son and Mercedes reunites with the Count, with all three sailing off into the sunset.  A dramatic departure, but on the extras the director is like, "I stand by that.  It's the only way the story even makes sense" and I kind of get where he's coming from.  As nice as it is to see the wicked punished, and as necessary as it may be for the Count to realize that the innocent by proximity, have also been punished in his mad schemes, it feels oddly unsatisfying for Mercedes (by all accounts a real stand up woman) to end her days poor and living off whatever money her son makes as a soldier (and what kind of future would the son of a now infamous traitor have in the army anyway?).  And the last scene we have with Mercedes we leave on a weird, uncertain note, basically - she won't accept help, so who knows how she'll live!

Maybe I'm softening in my old age.  Although maybe not, because I definitely forgot how Danglars' story ended and when I got to it, I was like, "This is it?! He keeps $50,000 livres and goes on his merry way?? This is bull#$%!" For real though, what the fuck.  Danglars basically engineered the whole damn thing, and he has no conscience, so appealing to one is a wasted effort.  I think the Count just ran out of steam there.  To be fair, Villefort's madness would leave a real bad taste in your mouth, but again, nothing that happened to these people was anything other than the result of their own evils, all brought home to roost. Yes, they could have lived undamaged lives if not for the Count, but simply because you are not caught being bad does not make you a good person.

 I also was paying much closer attention to the lesbian storyline this time around because last time I was kind of like, "Huh, that's kind of gay" and this time, I was like, "I'm pretty sure Dumas knew what the fuck he was doing with those two women."  If not, then, I mean, he's really good at writing lesbians accidentally.  

I read this while sailing around Greenland, which was great, because I had both plenty of time, and also (as a book I'd previously read) not so much invested in it that I wasn't able to do other things on the ship.  Honestly, I said I always get new things out of it each time I read it, but I keep re-reading it because I get the same things out of it too: entertainment, drama, REVENGE, guilt, sorrow, love, and epic-ness.  Whatever else Dumas may have been, he was a hell of a story-teller. 


07: A Re-read Of A Favorite Book