Book club is underway now, and I've been charging through The Count of Monte Cristo (or The Big M.C., as my sister called it when we last compared notes) as fast as my little eyes can go. Two things: 1. This is a bloody long book, but 2. a much lighter and more engaging read than I was expecting. It's billed as an adventure after all, a story of revenge, and like many novels written at that time (about 1844) it first appeared in serialized form. So there are cliffhangers, and a certain predictability to all the hanging does develop (every new character will, however vague and unlikely seeming their initial proximity to the Count, eventually either run into him personally or be connected to him via his long con. revenge plot), but it's drawn me in. It's all very no holds barred and, well, vengeful. It's refreshing. Cathartic. This is why I studied Classics. Why open your heart and forgive when you can make them pay? Then there are all the peripheral perks: If the hero is going to be rich, why not make him endlessly so? And why settle for some pedestrian, street-level hideaway when you can have a grotto on an island? It's sort of as if Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami were to abandon the very last vestiges of reality and really go for it.
The cast is rather large, and I have had to do some flipping back and forth to remind myself whose stepfather initially did what to the Count. Which in turn has made me glad I didn't rip the first three hundred or so pages off the front of the book when they threatened to detach from their shoddy binding last week. However, if I do have to amputate, I see Wikipedia has a handy diagram connecting all the characters. It does give away a few plot turns, but a sampling of the connections themselves give you a sense of the high stakes involved: wants to marry, kills, sells, poisons, poisons (but doesn't kill), raises with sister-in-law, tries to assassinate, runs away in a scandalous lesbian relationship with. It's heavy. I should really get back.
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