Number of pages: 1243
Number of reading days: I started Monte Cristo in January 2012, reading 100 pages a week or so. That plan only lasted several weeks because winter quarter soon became the I've-never-read-this-much-in-so-little-time-don't-mind-me-I'm-just-dying-the-death-of-an-English-major quarter (see A few pages later for more details). Picked the novel back up on Monday, June 11, and finished June 15. My estimate total: 10 days, maximum.
Why I read this book: Because my darling friend Sami gifted me a copy last Christmas. We intended to read the novel together (about 100 pages a week for the entirety of winter quarter) but failed quite miserably.
Thoughts: I honestly thought I wouldn't like this book. I've never been that drawn to French novelists, instead preferring to stick with my beloved Russians. But this novel captured my heart. I loved the intricacy of the plot, the numerous characters, the many villains (so usually reduced to one or two in adaptations), the details. And Dantés is such a phenomenal protagonist. Just as the Count of Monte Cristo wins the affection and awe of everyone he interacts with, so Dantés wins his readers' love.
I particularly liked how the narrative point of view functioned in the novel. The book is narrated by an anonymous and omniscient narrator who takes us from character to character and scene to scene. He (or she... but probably he) lets us in on certain characters' thoughts and helps the reader draw connections between scenes. But, there is something interesting about how this omniscient point of view treats Dantés. At the beginning, Dantés appears like any other character: we see his actions, occasionally are told how he's feeling, what his thoughts are, etc. After helping the Morrels in Chapter 30 ("The Fifth of September"), Dantés becomes the Count of Monte Cristo and suddenly, the reader loses all of his interiority. We are left with these final words:
"'And now' said the unknown, 'farewell kindness, humanity, and gratitude! Farewell to all the feelings that expand the heart! I have been Heaven's substitute to recompense the good--now the God of Vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!'
At these words he gave a signal, and, as if only awaiting this signal, the yacht instantly put out to sea."
While Dantés is Monte Cristo, or any of his other aliases, we mostly see him through the eyes of characters around him. Any words he speaks or emotions he displays are some part of his very complicated, highly improbable, but very brilliant revenge scheme. The first striking moment of interiority (that I noticed, at least; there may be another) appeared after the very moving scene between the Monte Cristo and Mercedes in Chapter 89:
"'What a fool I was,' said he, 'not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!'"
After this scene between Monte Cristo and Mercedes, we begin to see more and more of Dantés/Monte Cristo's thoughts and emotions.
Because Monte Cristo has so much control over the people around him and their proceedings, it almost felt like he was also in charge of how much information a reader is able to decipher. He is the author of his revenge plot. An author-character situation, similar to Prospero in The Tempest or the Duke in Measure for Measure.
I can connect almost anything to Shakespeare. It's a bit of an obsession.
Extra tid bit: National Theatre is putting on a production of The Count of Monte Cristo this winter. Hope it comes to National Theatre live. I would love to see it. More info here: National Theatre's Count of Monte Cristo
Favorite Passages & Quotes:
"This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantés, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?"
"There is only one serious matter to be considered in life, and that is death. So! Isn't it worth one's curiosity to study the different ways that the soul may leave the body and how, according to the character, temperament, or even local customs of a country, individuals face up to that supreme journey from being to nothingness?"
"Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels bound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum, even when they are gilded as you are capable of being."
"Tell me, Valentine, have you ever experienced an irresistible liking for someone which means that, although you are seeing this person for the very first time, you feel that you have known him for a long time and wonder where and when you may have seen him; so much so that, unable to recall either the place or the time, you come to think that is must have been in a world before our own and that the attraction is a reawakened memory?"
"Can one explain these feelings? Are there not places where one seems naturally to inhale an odour of sadness? Why? Who can tell? A linking of memories, a chance thought recalling other places and time, which may perhaps have no connection with the time and place in which we find ourselves."
"Morrel was thirty-one, Barrois sixty; Morrel was drunk with love, Barrois faint with heat. The two men, so different in age and interests, were like two sides of a triangle: separated at the base, meeting at the apex; the apex was Noirtier."
"'Maimillien,' the count said, 'the friends whom we have lost do not rest in the earth, they are buried in our hearts, and that is how God wanted it, so that we should always be in their company.'"
"'Darling,' replied Valentine, ' has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? "Wait and hope"'"
For other books I'm reading this summer, see: Summer Reading List 2012
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