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cnorbury 's review for:
The Count of Monte Cristo [Abridged]
by Alexandre Dumas
*groan* I can't believe I read the whole thing!
I expected a daunting read and got one. I'll give the experts their due and agree that this is a "great book" by literary standards of the 19th century. However, I'm not sure this would measure up to that standard when compared to "modern" classics.
Reasons why: This is a very dense book. Lots of telling vs. showing. Endless number of run-on and complex sentences. I counted one sentence that was more than 100 words. Hundreds were easily in the 50-100-word range. I've never seen so many semicolons in my life in one book. Dialogue in paragraphs was often spoken by two people, making it hard to understand who was saying what to whom. Answers to simple questions (yes or no) sometimes filled most of a page, and routinely filled several paragraphs. Author intrusion happened with almost every chapter. And finally, after six or seven hundred pages, I grew quite weary of the upper-crust characters discussing how many millions of francs they possessed and why that seemed to be the sole measure of their happiness in life.
On the plus side, I thought the plot was well-conceived and unique. Dumas wrote some great passages of description or of capturing the human condition in a nutshell. Particularly good were the scenes between the abbe and Dantes in prison. The Count of Monte Cristo was a wonderfully mysterious, powerful, influential man, especially when I understood what he went through to get to that point.
I expected a daunting read and got one. I'll give the experts their due and agree that this is a "great book" by literary standards of the 19th century. However, I'm not sure this would measure up to that standard when compared to "modern" classics.
Reasons why: This is a very dense book. Lots of telling vs. showing. Endless number of run-on and complex sentences. I counted one sentence that was more than 100 words. Hundreds were easily in the 50-100-word range. I've never seen so many semicolons in my life in one book. Dialogue in paragraphs was often spoken by two people, making it hard to understand who was saying what to whom. Answers to simple questions (yes or no) sometimes filled most of a page, and routinely filled several paragraphs. Author intrusion happened with almost every chapter. And finally, after six or seven hundred pages, I grew quite weary of the upper-crust characters discussing how many millions of francs they possessed and why that seemed to be the sole measure of their happiness in life.
On the plus side, I thought the plot was well-conceived and unique. Dumas wrote some great passages of description or of capturing the human condition in a nutshell. Particularly good were the scenes between the abbe and Dantes in prison. The Count of Monte Cristo was a wonderfully mysterious, powerful, influential man, especially when I understood what he went through to get to that point.