![]() etc., the novel is deeply entrenched in the personal – the story is centred around relatable family dynamics, that of father and son, mother and daughter, or of lover and lover, or friend and foe. Dantes’ personal circumstances are deeply entrenched in the politics of the day and it is because of the wrongful accusation of Bonapartism hatched by jealous rivals that he is sent to rot in prison without proper trial. For all its connection to the politics of France during the 1810s to 1840s, and to highfalutin themes of hope, mercy, vengeance, forgiveness etc. His life spans various changes on the macrocosmic level as well as the microcosmic – France goes through various changes in government and Dantes’ social standing and politics is necessarily affected by these, and, like all French novels of the period, Napoleon is probably lurking around the narrative somewhere. As I alluded to earlier, it follows the life of Edmond Dantes, a man who, over the course of his life, goes through many transformations into various personas. The Count of Monte Cristo feels like such a difficult book to review properly because it has so many different phases. “It’s necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.” I’m also not entirely sure that the entire hash subplot where a character got off his tits and hallucinating fucking a statue was at all necessary, apart from because Dumas enjoyed a bit of hash himself and fancied including it in his book. In particular, I would refer you to the Roman Bandits chapter which ran to some 30 pages in my edition and seemed like a completely incongruous digression until some 900 pages later when you finally received the pay-off of learning just why the entire boring section was actually quite relevant. It’s unsurprising (and perhaps inevitable) that, in a nearly 1300 page book, there are moments which weren’t really my kind of thing, or that I found overly long and descriptive, but what I will say is that every single occurrence in this book felt necessary, even if I wished it wasn’t. Much like the journey that Dumas’ protagonist, Edmond Dantes, goes on over the course of his life, the book itself has its ups and its downs. The first thing I can think of when trying to summon up all my many thoughts about a book of some 1276 pages is that The Count of Monte Cristo sure is a ride. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.” There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. “A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Publisher/Edition: Penguin Clothbound Classics
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