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Anyone else familiar with Monte Cristo? Raider Crusader I thought you've read this bad boy! You should if you haven't. Sure it's long but you gotta look at it like you would a TV Series like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones before it turned terrible. It's good entertainment that lasts a long time.
Now Mr. hammersticks, I have a complaint. It's minor enough but through 300 pages I think it sticks: Characterization. What can we really say about Dantés, about what kind of person he is, what his personality is like? We don't get that much. Maybe it's a limitation on 3rd person narration, but if you were describing Dantés to someone, could you say much about him?
We know just some basic stuff:
-highly competent sailor
-good natured, stand up guy
-Caring guy and loves his fiancee
-too trusting; naive. Assumes the best of people even when he shouldn't
-Fairly smart, the way he learned so much from his fellow prisoner and did all that undiscovered tunneling.
That's all we really get in these first 300 pages, and then when it flashes forward in time, some of that has totally changed. He's now cunning, ruthless, playing the long game, staying a step ahead of everyone. Feels like a totally different character when he's in Sinbad the Sailor mode than he was before.
Faulkner and Dostoevsky and even Hemingway put you into the head of their characters. They felt like real, often flawed, people. Dante's, far less so.
It was Shelby Foote that said that even a high school sophomore can write a surprisingly good description of a sunset, but the 2nd and 3rd levels of great fiction that a novelist must achieve are (1) being able to write characters that can stand up on their own two feet and (3) plot. Foote himself had characters that met that bar and I recommend checking him out.
I posit that Dumas had plot down really well, which is what makes this novel a classic. The suspense, the action, all on point. And his prose was elegant to the point that few literary figures could compare (only the best). I like all the historical references he throws in there - dude was very educated and well-researched. But I grade him down a little bit cause I don't think Dantés has great characterization.
My favorite character is M. Noiterer and I like Villefort, despite being the antagonist. Both those characters have some complexity and some mystery to them.
Do you agree or no about the characterization of Dante's?
Also I was talking to a coworker and she was telling me about her daughter being in ballet, a production of the Nutcracker. I said I can't claim to be much into ballet but I know Tchaikovsky composed that and Tchaikovsky is absolutely top notch. Then I googled to prove it and found that Dumas himself adapted the Nutcracker; basically he wrote it. Not sure what his source material was for the adaptation but some trivia for ya - he wrote Monte Cristo, he wrote 3 Musketeers, and he wrote the most famous ballet I can think of too! Talented cat.
More Monte Cristo discussion is needed!
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