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A review by bluejayreads
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
5.0
The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite classic books ever. This is a reread - I first read the full version back in 2013, and an abridged version before that - and it's still great as ever.
The story starts out incredibly simply. Edmond Dantès is the victim of a conspiracy by three men - Danglars, his rival for the captaincy of the ship Edmond sails on; Fernand, a man who loves Mercédès and hates that Mercédès loves Edmond over him; and Villefort, a man who has nothing against Edmond in particular but condemns him to protect his political interests. Edmond spends 14 years in prison without even knowing what crime he's accused of, where he befriends a fellow prisoner who teaches him everything from other languages to chemistry and also tells him where to find an unimaginably large fortune.
Edmond escapes prison and finds the fortune, and that's where things get incredibly and delightfully complicated. Edmond, now known as the Count of Monte Cristo, is out for revenge, but it's the type of revenge that's carefully orchestrated to slowly destroy everything these three men hold dear. All three are now married with children - Fernand has a son, and Danglars and Villefort both have a daughter. All of them are important characters. So are the owner of Edmond's old ship and his son, as well as a handful of young noblemen. There are subplots of romance and marriage. There are subplots of marital issues and past affairs. There are the subplots of all the different things the Count knows somehow. And through it all you get to watch the Count of Monte Cristo pull the strings of a beautiful and poetic revenge that leaves one of the three men bankrupt, one of them mad, and one of them dead.
There's a lot, and it does take some concentrating to keep track of all the different threads of everything going on - partly because the book is juggling so many characters with their own motivations and situations, and partly because it is written in a fairly dense nineteenth-century style (which I like, but not everybody does).
This book is great. The Count is always at least one step ahead of where you think he is and three steps ahead of what any of the characters think, and I absolutely love it. Plus reading about the Count's absurd displays of weath is pretty fun, too. It's a fantastic classic and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
The story starts out incredibly simply. Edmond Dantès is the victim of a conspiracy by three men - Danglars, his rival for the captaincy of the ship Edmond sails on; Fernand, a man who loves Mercédès and hates that Mercédès loves Edmond over him; and Villefort, a man who has nothing against Edmond in particular but condemns him to protect his political interests. Edmond spends 14 years in prison without even knowing what crime he's accused of, where he befriends a fellow prisoner who teaches him everything from other languages to chemistry and also tells him where to find an unimaginably large fortune.
Edmond escapes prison and finds the fortune, and that's where things get incredibly and delightfully complicated. Edmond, now known as the Count of Monte Cristo, is out for revenge, but it's the type of revenge that's carefully orchestrated to slowly destroy everything these three men hold dear. All three are now married with children - Fernand has a son, and Danglars and Villefort both have a daughter. All of them are important characters. So are the owner of Edmond's old ship and his son, as well as a handful of young noblemen. There are subplots of romance and marriage. There are subplots of marital issues and past affairs. There are the subplots of all the different things the Count knows somehow. And through it all you get to watch the Count of Monte Cristo pull the strings of a beautiful and poetic revenge that leaves one of the three men bankrupt, one of them mad, and one of them dead.
There's a lot, and it does take some concentrating to keep track of all the different threads of everything going on - partly because the book is juggling so many characters with their own motivations and situations, and partly because it is written in a fairly dense nineteenth-century style (which I like, but not everybody does).
This book is great. The Count is always at least one step ahead of where you think he is and three steps ahead of what any of the characters think, and I absolutely love it. Plus reading about the Count's absurd displays of weath is pretty fun, too. It's a fantastic classic and I wholeheartedly recommend it.