The unabridged Count, to my mind, is the only way to go. M. Nortier, that conniving revolutionary, gets short shrift in the abridgements, and he's my favorite character. All my commentary is based on the unabridged.

t trying to be obscure Yes, the Count does shift a great deal in the two halfs. I don't think any of the second half is even in his POV, he exists mostly as a Deux Ex Machina with a nasty, bitter streak. I've tried to re-read it many a time, but I always bog down in the second half, to my shame. I find myself skipping to the parts about the Next Generation.

The end of Monte Cristo, for thems as forgot:

Morcerf kills himself, and Mercedes retires to Marseilles to live as an unhappy widow. Albert joins the army. The prosecutor whose name I spaced realizes his wife is a murderer (faked death of Mlle. Wossname here), and "encourages" her to kill herself so he won't suffer the shame of arresting her. She kills herself, and her little boy, and Prosecutor Guy goes mad. Danglars flees to Rome with the last of his $$, and Luigi Vampa the gangster kidnaps him and makes him pay like 500 fr. a day for bread, till there is no money left, and then lets him go. (All at the Count's instigation.)

Then, Count finally reveals to a suicidal Young Morrel that Mlle. Wossname is not actually dead; that he and paralyzed Grandfather Noirtier conspired to fake it in order to out the mother as a murderer, and wow now that we have rendered Mlle. Wossname totally void if identity, how about you all run off happily into the sunset! Also, Count + Haydee the Persian child/slave/ward, which is a development that comes in on page 1100, is completed at page 1400, and feels like the author suddenly changed his mind and couldn't bear to leave the Count without some nooky at the end. And ICKY.

My personal hate-on is for Samuel Butler's The Way Of All Flesh -- just about the only novel I've ever read that I seriously, deeply regret (had to, for a class, otherwise never would have touched it). It struck me as endlessly whiny and self-pitying, and the protagonist's boundless bitterness about his rotten childhood just got up my nose in the worst way. His parent did a shitty job, his life sucked until he was old enough to get away--so fucking what? Somewhere around mid-book I started to feel real pity for his parents, who had probably had the exact same shitty childhoods themselves and were raising him the only way they knew how, doing the best they could with what they had. What they had was narrow and limited and incredibly damaging, but fuck, he got away from it, and instead of loving his freedom it felt to me like he was expending every ounce of energy he had hating them; and, more, like Butler himself thought this was just dandy. The novel to me read as bleak and harrowing in a distinctly un-cathartic way, and off-puttingly vindictive. I hated it as I've rarely hated anything before or since.

But I was all of 20 years old when I read it, so I'm perfectly open to explanations of how badly I misread it and how much I need to go back and give it a second look. I won't ever do so without that prompting, but I suppose it's within the realm of possibility.

The prosecutor is Villefort.

I wonder if Dumas was trying for an over the top Hamlet (which, to some, is an oxymoron), with the delayed revenge theme and all.

Turkish! That's what Haydee is--I think. She always seemed an utter cypher to me, as well. I was rooting for Mercedes the whole way. She is the only innocent--other than the kids.

Thanks, Nutty. Gotta agree with your assessment. Thematically better if the Count dies , but I'm not so sure his stay in the Chateau d'If is just a falling through cracks in the system. The folks put Dantes there out of self-interest and kept him there to avoid embarrassment.

What works do we hate? Here's one of my prime dislikes: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, by Samuel Johnson.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia.

This is, plot-wise at least, an adventure story. There's a prince who runs off to explore the world. There's a princess who runs off with him. They see amazing sights, get captured by pirates and escape, and otherwise have as much excitement as Wesley and Buttercup. However, Johnson lards the entire story with so much heavy-handed moralizing (yes, even for the 1700s) and so many absolutes (all the joys were here, all the blessings were there, and none of the sorrows were in that other place) that it's as interesting to read as my grocery list. (Want to know how much oatmeal I need to pick up tonight? Want to spend three paragraphs finding out? Didn't think so.) He manages to remove any tension from the allegedly dramatic or picturesque moments with his paragraphs upon paragraphs of meditating on the nature of man. Or death. Or power. You can say, yeah, that's 18th century lit. for you, but this man was writing at more of less the same time as Swift and Pope, with little of their skill. I think he's elevated to their stature in the canon because he had a particularly good PR flack in Boswell.

Wondering how Rasselas ends? The last chapter is titled, "The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded". I'll whitefont the last line. Of these wishes that they had formed they well knew that none could be obtained. They deliberated a while what was to be done, and resolved, when the inundation should cease, to return to Abissinia.

Samuel Johnson is entirely responsible for me switching my studies from 18th to late 19th century English lit.

My author that I hate that everyone else should hate too: Thomas Hardy.

Read Jude the Obscure in high school. Hated it. Ten years later in grad school, read it again. Thought "maybe I was just being an obnoxious high school senior with no patience for work." Nope. Hated it more. Read The Mayor of Casterbridge last semester. Hate-on is definitely for Hardy, not just for Jude. His characters are never sympathetic, his plots are just excuses to beat people up, and his overall message is basically "life sucks", which I knew on my own, thank you.

Fred Pete, I believe you're correct re: the Chateau. Villefort was about to release Dantes until he realized that his father, Nortier, was involved and Dad's involvement would wreck his career.

end font

The last chapter is titled, "The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded".

Oh my god, it's like a novelization of Dogville.

Well, but there was the whole Napoleon thing. If Napoleon hadn't left Elba when he did, the whole imprisonment might have been much, much shorter, and thus the bitter would not have been quite so acute.

Actually what is funny is seeing movie adaptations of the book, where they (necessarily) shorten and simplify -- one recent one made Albert into the Count's son, and Mercedes married (a combined Morcerf/Danglars character) quickly in order to hide the illegitimacy of her pregnancy. It made for a (not in the book but) very dramatic reveal at the end, which led to swordfighting, and I can't but approve of swordfighting.

I do get the sense that Monte Cristo started out as one thing, and morphed as Dumas was writing it into a thing where the Count became his ego-ideal. And that's why the ending is weak -- he didn't have the stones to kill his own ego-ideal; his ego-ideal couldn't end up alone and bitter; his ego-ideal couldn't get back together with someone who had married his enemy. Otherwise, I think it could have been a fascinating study of what revenge -- and expiation -- does to the soul; instead, it was a half-baked adventure, which was great fun, but not satisfying.