Review: The Count of Monte Cristo

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quite long (>= 1200 pages unabridged) and melodramatic, although to be expected I guess. I can see why it's considered a classic, as the adventurous atmosphere seems like it could've been revolutionary for its time, and most of the last third is actually incredibly epic; this basically is the quintessential revenge story. However, the exaggerated melodrama got a little tiring for me after a while, and if I were to go off this novel alone, I'd expect most French men in the 19th century to be emotionally hot-headed and suicidal whenever things didn't go their way. (Oh wait, that's what duels were for.)

The plot takes a while to pick up- about a couple hundred pages for the main premise to actually set up, and then another several hundred for the actual main action to set up because the Count just happens to be incredibly patient about how long it takes get revenge on people... and even goes so far as to reason out why he's okay with taking so long at one point. It's still entertaining in the meantime, but I have to say as someone who normally hates seeing abridged versions of books, this is one book where I wouldn't be as bothered as much about it. You don't really need that many chapters to get to the gist of the storyline when it comes down to it, unless you're superficial like me and care about the bragging rights of having conquered the entire 1200+ page behemoth original (yes, I admit it).

There's also an awful lot of telling instead of showing, or rather one character narrating a story that happened in the past to such an extent that the narrator may as well have been the one doing it. I mean, technically the entire novel is having a story narrated to you anyway, but it starts to break your suspension of belief after a while of seeing one guy within the story recount an entire sequence of events plus dialogue word-for-word in one chapter, and then someone else do the exact same thing in a written letter, and then have it happen again in a suddenly discovered will (...why does this will need dialogue), and then so on. It's like that messenger-speech narrative technique they used in ancient Greek plays where they had some random character who no one cared about suddenly appear on stage recounting a horrifically tragic scene that just took place off-stage ten seconds ago... only most novels don't suffer the same kinds of restrictions that plays do and it's not clear to me why they still felt the need to do it here. But that's just me nitpicking anyway; it might well just be a 19th century Romanticism thing.

On a tangential note, considering the number of people who've come up to me in the past and been like "HOW HAVE YOU NOT READ THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO YET?!" I have to say that I still don't really see what the big deal is haha. I never had this book assigned for English in the past and it just never occurred to me to read it in my spare time when I was younger... and the long length didn't exactly help much either. But then again, I guess it's not like I go around chastising people for not having read Gatsby or To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever. (...but seriously, if you're going to be that way, don't talk to me until you've read Sound and the Fury or Portrait.)