High Society of Big Words: The Count of Monte Cristo
3:25:00 PM
This summer I read the Count of Monte Cristo in its entirety, and I have to say, I've quite possibly found my favorite book. I went into it thinking that I might not get through the entire thing, but aside from the very beginning of the book where they were laying the groundwork, I loved it and had trouble putting it down. I know people say this a lot, but I seriously was giving people the death glare if they interrupted my reading session, and this includes Zane, my toddler son.
The idea for Count of Monte Cristo came about when Alexandre Dumas read a police report of a man who had started a lemonade stand and then killed his competitors, who had worked together to try to bring him down. Which, if you ask me, could be another book entirely because that does sound quite riveting.
In the beginning of the novel, Edmund Dantes is made captain of a ship, gets engaged to the woman of his dreams, and all is well. He is blissfully happy, humble as can be about his good fortune, and looking forward to being with Mercedes forever. Unfortunately Dantes' bliss comes to an end when two men conspire against him and report that he is a Bonapartist. Dantes and Mercedes' wedding feast is interrupted when Dantes is arrested and eventually thrown into a prison set on a lone island. Through his anger and resentment, Dantes becomes a hardened man, believing that God has abandoned him. He survives only thinking of the beautiful Mercedes, how it will soon be realized that he is innocent, and then hastily returned to her. Once he meets the Abbe, a fellow prisoner, he comes to find out that not only has he been abandoned by God, but he has been forsaken by men, the very men that have benefited by having him put him into prison. Dantes, with the dutiful help of the Abbe, escapes prison and sets out to seek his revenge on all who turned their backs on him.
As Dantes goes about seeking his revenge, readers are left wondering if he is just in his motives. Does getting vengeance actually restore happiness? And at what point does vengeance turn cold-blooded? Has God abandoned Dantes or has Dantes abandoned God in his quest?
If that little synopsis isn't getting you excited about reading the book (because I literally just made myself want to read it again), then I don't know what will!
As always, here are some things you should know about the Count of Monte Cristo.
1. If you are only interested in reading the book because you've seen the 2002 movie, you might be disappointed.
I read the book and then immediately watched the movie after I finished because everyone had asked me if I had seen the movie when they saw me reading. When the 1,000th person had asked me if I had seen it, I really got my hopes up about being able to finish the book and watch everything I had loved unfold before my eyes.
I was extremely disappointed. Perhaps it was too soon, but the movie completely twists the story line of the books and changes events entirely. I would like to think of the movie as "loosely based on the book" or "only shares proper nouns with the book." It was frustrating to read such a heart wrenching tale of agony and loss to find that the movie had taken everything sad about the book and changed it so that the movie could end in a happy-go-lucky kind of way.
If you loved the dynamics of the relationships in the movie and thought that the ending was the most beautiful way to wrap up the story of Edmund, this book is not for you.
2. The sequence of events may be hard to follow.
The book has several characters that are important to the story line. You may be looking at your book and thinking, "I am halfway through the book and Dantes is still in prison!" Don't worry, the plot will get very intense in just a few moments! At one point, you may feel like the entire novel has shifted, but just know that in Dantes' cunning ways, every person is important as he enacts his vengeance. Stick with the book through the thin because the thick is juicy and worth it. You'll be wishing that the book could slow down so that you can process everything you think is going to happen in mere minutes.
If you ever get confused by the characters or what is happening in the book, which happened to me - especially when I had to take a break in between reading, I found it really helpful to use a sticky note as my book mark and use it to keep track of the characters on. I don't want to spoil anything, but you'll definitely be using the sticky note trick.
"He decided it was human hatred and not divine vengeance that had plunged him into this abyss. He doomed these unknown men to every torment that his inflamed imagination could devise, while still considering that the most frightful were too mild and, above all, too brief for them: torture was followed by death, and death brought, if not repose, at least an insensibility that resembled it."
3. There are some passages that you may be sensitive to.
This book is truly filled with heart-ache from about 30 pages in until the very end. There are some passages in the book that made me gasp from disbelief. Some may find these passages to be very disturbing while others might not really notice them. Describing the pains that men can inflict on men is really one of the main themes of this novel and unfortunately that is something that you will have to deal with as you come across it.
The book does not include anything gratuitous, but there are passages that mentally and emotionally were hard for me to read just because of where I was at in life. If you need to skim a few pages because of this, that is more than ok.
As always, give this book a try! Let me know if you've read it and what you thought! I would love to fangirl it out with you!
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