nicanical
Awesome revenge story: sailor Edmond Dantès, on the verge of marriage and captaincy, is framed and imprisoned. He eventually escapes, transforms himself into the titular Count, and moves to reap the pounds of flesh owed to him.
I read the unabridged Robin Buss translation. It's very good, very readable. Buss modernized the manuscript so his version reads like a contemporary work, though he did leave in some obnoxiously long complex sentences.
Good pacing, good flow. The book is hard to put down. Despite its length (approaching 400,000 words) it's all killer no filler. Well . . . except Luigi Vampa's backstory—Dumas shares all these details about Cucumetto and Carlini as background to Vampa, but Vampa ultimately plays small roles in the middle and end of the story.
The story slows down where Dumas introduces new settings or important characters because he front-loads a lot of his descriptive work. The Count invariably appears soon after to tie it all to the main arc so these moments don't slow the pace too badly. The last few chapters are slow too, but only because the revenge plot is mostly complete three-quarters through. The last few chapters serve to wind down some outstanding items and address the Count's eleventh hour crisis with his actions.
More of the behind the scenes would have been nice, showing the Count laying down the foundations for his many identities and maybe more of their movements (like Lord Wilmore's); details are so sparse that the Count's machinations and contrivances are sometimes dubious—like how is there such a convenient secret passage leading to Valentine's room? I get that the lack of details adds to the mystery and almost supernatural appearance of the Count's movements which goes hand in hand with his self-image as an agent of providence. I would have preferred to have seen more of the toil and planning and human achievement though.
Awesome revenge story: sailor Edmond Dantès, on the verge of marriage and captaincy, is framed and imprisoned. He eventually escapes, transforms himself into the titular Count, and moves to reap the pounds of flesh owed to him.
I read the unabridged Robin Buss translation. It's very good, very readable. Buss modernized the manuscript so his version reads like a contemporary work, though he did leave in some obnoxiously long complex sentences.
Good pacing, good flow. The book is hard to put down. Despite its length (approaching 400,000 words) it's all killer no filler. Well . . . except Luigi Vampa's backstory—Dumas shares all these details about Cucumetto and Carlini as background to Vampa, but Vampa ultimately plays small roles in the middle and end of the story.
The story slows down where Dumas introduces new settings or important characters because he front-loads a lot of his descriptive work. The Count invariably appears soon after to tie it all to the main arc so these moments don't slow the pace too badly. The last few chapters are slow too, but only because the revenge plot is mostly complete three-quarters through. The last few chapters serve to wind down some outstanding items and address the Count's eleventh hour crisis with his actions.
More of the behind the scenes would have been nice, showing the Count laying down the foundations for his many identities and maybe more of their movements (like Lord Wilmore's); details are so sparse that the Count's machinations and contrivances are sometimes dubious—like how is there such a convenient secret passage leading to Valentine's room? I get that the lack of details adds to the mystery and almost supernatural appearance of the Count's movements which goes hand in hand with his self-image as an agent of providence. I would have preferred to have seen more of the toil and planning and human achievement though.