Reviews
Alexandre Dumas was a well known French author, famous for his historical novels. Among these novels include The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Since their publication in 1844, literary critics, students, and avid readers have written and analyzed his works time and time again, each offering new insight and perspective into the world that Dumas created.
The following are selected reviews:
1. The Counte of Monte Cristo, by Jesse Kwong
The Count of Monte Cristo
By Jesse Kwong, student at American High
The novel was very intriguing and thrilling to me. I had to keep reading the novel because it was filled with suspense, drama, thrill, and adventure. The Count of Monte Cristo contains various aspects of emotions such as joy, suffering, hatred, and revenge. There are so many twist and turns that resides within this novel and I would recommend this novel to many readers who like suspense, drama, and adventure. In the novel, the main character Edmond Dantes is persecuted for charges of being a Bonapartist. He is framed by his envious friends unknowingly and is imprisoned for fourteen years of his life. He then seeks out vengeance against those that have betrayed him.
(5/5)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Anonymous)
“I was only vaguely aware of the title of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas until…I saw the Wishbone version on PBS years ago. (Don’t laugh — I benefited from a lot of culture on children’s programming. 
) But that put the intriguing story on my mental list of books I wanted to read some day. I have been working my way through some of the classics over the last few years and have just finished reading the Count.
In the past I had read The Three Musketeers and The Man In the Iron Mask by Dumas, and I have to say I was disappointed in them, in the darkness of the latter especially. The ending differs from any film version of it I have seen. So I approached the Count with a little bit of trepidation, but it is my favorite of these three Dumas books.
Originally published in the 1840s, the story is that of Edmund Dantes, a young sailor on the verge of being promoted to captain of his ship and of marrying his longtime sweetheart. Mercedes, in France during the era just before Napoleon’s Hundred Days. Edmund has enemies he is not wary enough of, a jealous shipmate and another who loves Mercedes, and these two plot together to implicate him as a Bonapartist traitor. The main piece of evidence comes into the hands of one prosecutor who could potentially be harmed by its contents, so to protect himself he destroys the evidence and lets Edmund go to prison.
Edmund, of course, despairs, tries to see the governor of the prison to plead his cause, and is rewarded with bring thrown further into the dungeon. He decides to starve himself until he hears the faint sounds of digging, and the possibility of interacting with another human being other than his jailer revives his desire to live. He and the other prisoner, Abbe Faria, do make contact, and the Abbe becomes something of a mentor to Edmund, teaching him all he knows both of education and society. Thus his fourteen years in prison actually serve to make him the man he later becomes.
When the Abbe dies, Edmund sees his chance to escape by placing the Abbe’s body in his cell and hiding himself in the Abbe’s burial shroud. The Abbe had told him of and bequeathed to him a treasure buried on the island of Monte Cristo, which Edmund finds and the uses to perfect his new persona as the Count of Monte Cristo. He then sets himself to reward those who were loyal to him and stood by him and to exact vengeance on the three men who were instrumental in imprisoning him.
The story is quite intriguing as the reader understands the Count’s ultimate purpose but wonders exactly what he is up to as events unfold. Some characters who appear at first to be a distraction to the main plot are found actually to be integral to it. Though at first his designs fall into place perfectly, the Count eventually finds many unintended consequences of his actions and has to wrestle with his conscience before God to determine the best way to ultimately do the right thing by the various people affected by his actions.
Wikipedia describes this as an adventure novel, and it certainly is that, but it is full of intrigue as well. Those I would not call it a Christian book, there are many Christian principles throughout. Modern readers would find it a bit melodramatic in places — at least six times various people threaten to kill themselves due to shame or loss. I don’t know if that was a popular mode of dealing with problems at the time or popular literary plot device. Though it does drag a bit in places overall the book is very well crafted.
The 1998 Tom Doherty associates version that I read says that it is complete and unabridged, which is what I wanted, but I was disappointed to find that it was not complete: in reading over the Wikipedia summary, I found several strands on the plot that were not in this book. Some of the situations now make more sense to me. I wouldn’t look at the Wikipedia listing, though, until after you have read the book as it does detail most of the plot and you’ll lose the fun of discovery if you read it.
I’ve seen reference to several film versions, and if you have read the book and seen any of the films I’d love to know which film version you think is best.”
http://barbarah.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/book-review-the-count-of-monte-cristo/
The Count of Monte Cristo (John Scott Ryan)
“Alexandre Dumas’s _The Count of Monte Cristo_ is one of the greatest novels of all time and in fact stands at the fountainhead of the entire stream of popular adventure-fiction. Dumas himself was one of the founders of the genre; every other such writer — H. Rider Haggard, C.S. Forrester, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, John Grisham — is deeply in his debt.
The cold, brooding, vampiric Count (born Edmond Dantes; known also, among other aliases, as “Sinbad the Sailor,” Lord Wilmore, and a representative of the firm of Thomson and French) is the literary forebear of every dark hero from Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Pimpernel to Zorro, Batman, the Green Hornet, and Darkman. And the intricate plot provides everything any reader could want: adventure, intrigue, romance, and (of course) the elegant machinations of the Count himself as he exacts his terrible revenge on those who have wronged him — thereby serving, or so he believes, as an agent of divine justice and retribution. Brrrrrrrr.
The book is also a good deal _longer_ than many readers may be aware. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, the English translations have omitted everything in the novel that might offend the sensibilities of Victorian readers — including, for example, all the sex and drugs.
That’s why I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this novel read Robin Buss’s full-text translation. Unlike, say, Ayn Rand (whose cardboard hero “John Galt” also owes his few interesting aspects to Monsieur le Comte), Dumas was entirely capable of holding a reader’s undivided attention for over a thousand pages; Buss’s translation finally does his work justice, restoring all the bits omitted from the Bowdlerized versions.
The heart of the plot, as most readers will already know, is that young sailor Edmond Dantes, just as his life starts to come together, is wrongfully imprisoned for fourteen years in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If as the victim of a monstrously evil plot to frame him as a Bonapartist. While in prison he makes the acquaintance of one Abbe Faria, who serves as his mentor and teaches him the ways of the world (science, philosophy, languages and literature, and so forth), and also makes him a gift of a fabulous treasure straight out of the _Thousand and One Nights_. How Dantes gets out of prison, and what he does after that — well, that’s the story, of course. So that’s all I’m going to tell you.
However, I’ll also tell you that the 2002 screen adaptation doesn’t even begin to do it justice. The plot is so far “adapted” as to be unrecognizable, except in its broad outlines and the names of (some of) the characters. Pretty much everything that makes Dumas’s novel so darkly fascinating has been sucked out of it. It’s not a bad movie on its own terms, but if you’re expecting an adaptation of this novel, you’ll be disappointed. And if you’ve already seen it, don’t base your judgment of the novel on it.”
http://www.amazon.com/Count-Monte-Cristo-Modern-Library/dp/0679601996