Rating: 
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: I found the thought of reading this book rather intimidating as it's 1077 pages long. Once reading however, it was compulsive enough to be worth the effort (I'm a slow reader). It holds an extremely clever plot which hooked me and made me admire the author and the book but...never quite managed to make me really believe in the Count as a man; this Godlike being formerly a young sailor, wrongly imprisoned, educated by a fellow-lag into this all-knowing, manipulative and omnipotent (but sentient) creation. I had to will the suspension of disbelief and managed it just enough to enjoy the book. I liked, or rather agreed with, the idealistic themes, the lack of truly good and bad main characters - the four of Dantes targets are all very human. Some of the secondary characters seemed too good to be true though but more depth to them may have resulted in a further few hundred pages!
Taken less seriously, if you just want to enjoy a book, it's a compulsive, fun read with not too many frustratingly long-drawn out parts- though there are some.
Rating: 
Summary: A truly remarkable work!
Review: This is one of the best books ever written. The characterizations are remarkable. Certainly a "must-have" for anyone who likes to read. It is a long book, but the richness of the text will more than compensate you for the time spent reading.
The characters all comport themselves with a dignity and nobility that cannot be seen or portrayed by people of our time period. It is as though all of the characters have the distinction of Anthony Hopkins(and this still does not do it justice!). This work is a feast for the mind!
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece for All Times.
Review: Every year amusement parks around the world spend millions of dollars trying to build the biggest and fastest roller coasters. These parks seek to give their visitors the greatest thrills possible on these rides without actually endangering the riders and thrill seekers flock to these parks by the thousands in order to take what they hope will be the ride of their lives. My advice is to skip the long trips and even longer lines and take a ride with Alexander Dumas and Edmond Dantes. No technology known to man can match the excitement and adventure you will thus find.
Make no mistake; this will be a long and sometimes bumpy ride. Dumas occasionally will drop his reader into a chapter that seems to have no relevance to any of the chapters before it. After a while though, it will all become crystal clear as this master storyteller weaves his magic. There will be twists and turns that the reader will not be able to foresee and in the end you will marvel at the scope of the story and the extent of both the vengeance and kindness of the story's hero.
As with many great works of literature, there have been many film adaptations of this book. Some were of course better than others were but none of these films come close to doing this book justice. If you have watched any or all of these films, be prepared to find that the book will often only resemble the films in that the characters have the same names. At least the characters that make it into the films will have the same names but many of the characters in the book never make it into the films. This book is simply too rich and too deep to be captured on film. To really experience Dumas' work you simply must read the book.
This is a story of love lost, of deception, jealousy and murder. Within this book the reader will find villains so vile that they seem almost inhuman but when their downfall comes it is so terrible that one almost feels for these wretched creatures. All through the book the reader sees the story building to a climax, but it builds slowly. So slowly in fact that the reader will be almost on the edge of his or her seat as they wait for the inevitable falling of the ax. When the final act does finally come, the reader will know the characters so well that they will almost be able to feel their agony. On the other hand, the reader will also see that the Count's victims would not have become victims but for their own greed and pride. The traps laid by the Count simply would not have worked had not his victims been ruled by same vices that led them to wrong Dantes in the first place. As with all great works of fiction, the moral lessons are there, but buried under the surface so that they don't interfere with a great story.
This is indeed a great story.
Rating:
Summary: A Great story that reads quicker than it's length suggests.
Review: I hope the reader will forgive me, but since other reviewers did a fine job of commenting on this wonderful story, I'd like to dwell more on this books author, the great Alexandre Dumas. The man is an incredible writer who, despite the length of some of his novels, is able to entice the reader on and on and when the story ends they put down the book wishing that there was more to read. The reader by the end is won over by the enduring characters, good, bad, and in between, by the intricate and exciting plot, and by the wonderful wit of the author who is almost another character himself because of the flair of his writing.
All I can say is that if you are the type of reader who can be scared off by the length of a novel, you should realize that Dumas' books usually move along at a wonderful pace and that everything in them is essential reading, and everything cut out of the abridged editions is a loss to the reader.
So that being said I recommend The Count of Monte Cristo very highly, and recommend also that if you choose to read it that you are sure to get an unabridged copy. To cut out parts of this wonderful story is a crime, and a needless one considering how wonderfully told this story is.
Rating:
Summary: Definetly a Classic
Review: Look, if you've seen the movie, it's a good adaptation, yet, as often with movies, it is diminished when compared to the book. THis is even more so with Monte Cristo, the book is quite long, but filled with intrigue, if you think Dantes could be cruel on the film, just read the book. Also, it has a less corny ending, which I appreciate.
Truth, the book is quite long, but it is completely absorbing, I just couldn't put it down, I finished it on 12 hours of straight non stop reading, just couldn't stop until the end. I most definetly recommend this book, and would consider it as a Must read for anyone who claims to be at least moderately knowledgeable.
Rating:
Summary: Dish of Revenge, served Piping Cold
Review: Parisian bon vivant, drinker, womanizer and genius Alexandre Dumas has, in "The Count of Montecristo", given the world one of the greatest stories ever told.
It is a marvel of literary invention. Its literary scope and scale and historical sweep is nothing short of revolutionary, and for all of its grandeur and jaw-dropping perspective, it is unfailingly intimate, brutally so.
"The Count of Montecristo" is the story of young Edmond Dantes, a French sailor aboard the merchant-vessel Pharaon in 1815, who returns to the port of Marseilles with the glorious Catalan girl Mercedes waiting to be his bride, and with a promising future as the captain of the merchantman ahead of him.
Or so he thinks: for there is no poison so bitter, so brutal, or so deadly as envy. And as Old Scratch slithered forth as a serpent to poison even earthly paradise, so too Dantes is stalked by an envious trio of the sort that put Caesar in an early grave: the bitter and calculating Danglars, supercargo of the Pharaon; Danglars's drinking buddy Caderousse; and Mercedes's cousin Fernand, hopelessly in love with his cousin and aghast at her impending marriage to Dantes.
It is 1815; a time of shaky stability for France and Europe. The Ogre of Corsica has just been put down, exiled to Elba---but Bonapartist clubs assassinate Royalist generals in the capital, and the alleys of Marseilles are rife with whispers of Napoleon's return.
It is into this poisonous, heated, feverish atmosphere that this trio of serpents work their vindictive magic, and with the flick of a plume the happy Dantes, on the very day of his wedding and at his nuptial feast, finds himself surrounded by soldiers, held at bayonet point, and hauled before the implacable gaze of Justice. And fatality!---Justice consigns him to the wretched dungeons of the Chateau D'If, a heartless, impregnable rock off the coast of France---for the rest of his life.
To say anything more would be to give far too much away, but know this: "The Count of Montecristo" is both black book of revenge and horror tale: a consumptively engaging story of double Betrayal, Death, and Despair: a Man consigned to death and rot by his supposed friends and colleagues, buried beneath the Earth in a great black tomb, forgotten by his best beloved, lost to everything, left for the teeth of rat and Time.
And it is also a tale of Resurrection---and Revenge.
You'll want to get a copy of the unabridged version; Random House's The Modern Library edition (published in 1996) is a fine choice, and just so you can check (be warned: the shelves are full of sliced and diced pretenders) the unexpurgated version clocks in at a hefty 1462 pages. That means once you're through with it, you can use it to forestall a burglary or brain an assassin.
Never have 1500 pages moved so swiftly and deftly. A rumor, bandied around the streets of Paris in Dumas's day which resurfaced in Perez y Reverte's mesmerizing "Club Dumas", is that the jolly-faced Dumas signed a blood-contract with Satan, and in return for his soul he was given a diabolic gift to be prolific.
Diabolic or Angelic, there is no doubt that Dumas is pure genius: you marvel at the simultaneous breadth and depth and intimacy of "Count of Montecristo". There is no padding here; not one sentence is superfluous and every word tells. A paragraph sliced away here, a sentence taken out there, and the perfect, brutal, logical, coldly calculating structure would fall apart.
In the meantime, the reader is introduced to some of the most fascinating and memorable characters in history: the tragic, beautiful Mercedes; her dandyish son Albert; her husband, the stiff and martial Count Fernand de Mortcerf. We see, in his middle age, the ever-calculating banker Danglars and his miserable family, including the boyish, driven, devious and ultimately foolish Eugenie; the Prosecutor of the King, Villefort, and his fascinating family: the hopelessly innocent Valentine, the paralyzed, rabid old Jacobin M. de Noirtier, and the Prosector's young---and tragically greedy---trophy wife.
Beyond these characters, "Count of Montecristo" gives us even more, taking us deep into the lives of France's Rich & Famous---and villainous! We come face to face with the Old Ogre of Corsica himself, Napoleon Bonaparte. We pass the time in Latin and philosophy with the foppish, foolish, overly confident King Louis XVIII, who would rather count the angels on the head of a pin than martial his troops against the lively spectre of Bonapartism.
And I have but scratched the surface: this story is the very essence, the pure, undiluted blood, of swashbuckling fantasy. Here we have pirates and Roman brigands, the famous Italian banditti Luigi Vampa, stories within stories within stories, buried treasure on a deserted volcanic island rising up over the waves of the Tyrrhennian sea. We have mad monks, and midnight assignations, and foundlings and changelings and villainous [...] sons appearing out of the blue. We have plots, and poisonings, and murder, and villainy, and great heroism; we have connections to the marvellous, tragic downfall of the great Abyssinian hero Ali Pasha.
In short, we have a marvellous witch's brew of high treason and infamy, a Devil's Codex of revenge, retribution, and absolution. My flimsy prose is not worthy to provide adequate praise to this masterpiece: get a copy, close the curtains, have a bottle of your finest chianti at the ready, smoke some Montecristo cigars if you're a smoker (you should know that these, the finest the Dominican Republic offers, were inspired by this tale), turn off all the phones in the house---and transport yourself to a tale of betrayal, death, resurrection, villainy and revenge---served Piping Cold.
Rating:
Summary: Man of mystery with a mission
Review: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père. Highly recommended.
As translator Robin Buss points out in his introduction, many of those who haven't read The Count of Monte Cristo assume it is a children's adventure story, complete with daring prison escape culminating in a simple tale of revenge. There is very little for children in this very adult tale, however. Instead, the rich plot combines intrigue, betrayal, theft, drugs, adultery, presumed infanticide, torture, suicide, poisoning, murder, lesbianism, and unconventional revenge.
Although the plot is roughly linear beginning with Edmond Dantès' return to Marseille, prenuptial celebration, and false imprisonment and ending with his somewhat qualified triumphant departure from Marseille and France, Dumas uses the technique of interspersing lengthy anecdotes throughout. The story of Cardinal Spada's treasure, the origins of the Roman bandit Luigi Vampa (the least germane to the novel), Bertuccio's tale of his vendetta, and the account of the betrayal and death of Ali Pasha are few of the more significant stories-within-the-novel. While Dumas devotes an entire chapter to bandit Luigi Vampa's background, he cleverly makes only a few references to what will remain the plot's chief mystery-how the youthful, intelligent, and naive sailor Edmond Dantès transforms himself into the worldly, jaded, mysterious Renaissance man and Eastern philosopher, the count of Monte Cristo, presumably sustained by his own advice of "wait" and "hope."
This novel is not a simple tale of simple revenge. The count does not kill his enemies; he brilliantly uses their vices and weaknesses against them. Caderousse's basic greed is turned against him, while Danglars loses the only thing that has any meaning for him. Fernand is deprived of the one thing that he had that he had never earned-his honour. In the process, he loses the source of his initial transgression, making his fate that much more poignant. The plot against Villefort is so complicated that even Monte Cristo loses control of it, resulting in doubt foreign to his nature and remorse that he will not outlive.
This long but generally fast-paced is set primarily in Marseille, Rome, and Paris. It begins with Dantès' arrival in Marseille aboard the commercial vessel Pharaon and ends with his departure from Marseille aboard his private yacht, accompanied by the young, beautiful Greek princess Haydée. What gives The Count of Monte Cristo its life, however, are the times in which it is set-the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the First and Second Restoration, and the Revolution of 1830. Life-and-death politics motivates many of the characters and keeps the plot moving. Dumas also uses real people in minor roles, such as Countess G- (Byron's mistress) and the Roman hotelier Signor Pastrini, which adds to the novel's sense of historical veracity.
The most troubling aspect of The Count of Monte Cristo is Edmond Dantès himself. His claim to represent a higher justice seems to justify actions and inactions that are as morally reprehensible as those that sent him to prison, for example, his account of how he acquired Ali and his loyalty. Had he not discovered young Morrel's love for Valentine Villefort, she too might have become an innocent victim. As it is, there are at least two other innocents who die, although one clearly would not have been an innocent for long based on his behaviour in the novel. One wonders of Dantès' two father figures, his own flower-loving father and fellow prisoner Abbé Faria, would have approved of the count.
The translation appears to be good, with a few slips into contemporary English idioms that sound out of place. In his introduction, Buss states that the later Danglars and Fernand have become unrecognizable and that Fernand in particular has been transformed "from the brave and honest Spaniard with a sharp sense of honour . . . to the Parisian aristocrat whose life seems to have been dedicated to a series of betrayals." There is never anything honest or honourable about Fernand; his very betrayal of Edmond is merely the first we know of in his lifelong pattern.
What seems extreme and somewhat unrealistic about Fernand is his transformation from an uneducated Catalan fisherman into a "Parisian aristocrat," hobnobbing with statesmen, the wealthy, and the noteworthy of society. This, however, is the result of the milieu that the novel inhabits. During these post-Revolution, post-Napoleonic years, Fernand could rise socially through his military and political accomplishments just as Danglars does through his financial acumen. Danglars is careful to note that the difference between them is that Fernand insists upon his title, while Danglars is openly indifferent to and dismissive of his; his viewpoint is the more aristocratic.
Countess G- is quick to point out that there is no old family name of Monte Cristo and that the count, like many other contemporaries, has purchased his title. It serves mainly to obscure his identity, nationality, and background and to add to the aura of mystery his persona and Eastern knowledge create. What is most telling is that his entrée into Parisian society is based primarily on his great wealth, not his name. Dumas reinforces this point with Andrea Cavalcanti, another mystery man of unknown name and reputed fortune.
I have read The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers series, both of which surprised me with their dark aspects (the character and fate of Lady de Winter, for example) and which little resembled the adventure stories distilled from them for children and for film. When I overheard a college student who was reading The Count of Monte Cristo on the bus tell a friend that she couldn't put it down, I was inspired to read it. I couldn't put it down, either, with its nearly seamless plot, dark protagonist, human villains, turbulent historical setting, and larger-than-life sense of mystery. At 1,078 pages, it's imposing, but don't cheat yourself by settling for an abridged version. You'll want to pick up every nuance.
Diane L. Schirf, 12 September 2004.
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: The Count of Monte Cristo is my favorite book of all time. I read the abridged version in Jr. High and named it #1. I picked up the unabridged version of my own accord in college and fell in love all over again. I will read it again and again. Please read the full story of Edmond Dantes. You will thank yourself...
Rating:
Summary: The Best!
Review: This is and will probably continue to be my favorite boook of all time. It has got everything you could possibly want in a book. It's got betrayal, love, imprisonment, vengance, action, drama, and comedy. But you can read the synopsis for yourself.More important than the plot of the story is that the reader will learn to love Edmond Dantes, the main character. They will admire his strength, his wits, his arrogance, and the way he learnes from his mistakes. The reader will also learn to completely hate Danglars, Villefort, and Fernand. Every single horrible thing that happens to them, the reader will truly believe is justly deserved, even when Edmond believes it's too much. The writing is also wonderful. The reader will practically be transported to France as they read this novel. The word choice is so magnificent and the sentences flow so well that the reader will feel every emotion that the characters do, and will probably even taste the sweet Parisian air in their mouths. I first read the Signet Classic abridged version, and I thought this novel was great, but then I picked up the unabridged Modern Library version and enjoyed it even more. This book will change your life and I would highly suggest that everyone in the world read this book. Move over Shakespeare because you have just been dethrowned.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read!
Review: This is honestly one of the greatest novels I have ever read. I absolutely loved this book. I could not put it down! This is a must read for anyone.When I first started into this novel, I had in my memory the 'movie' that was made for the big screen. So of course, I expected the book to be very similar to it. Well, I was very wrong! Other than Edmond Dantes being betrayed by his 'friends' and finding the treasure, this book takes on a different route.
Believe me, the book is much more superb. The way the Count exacts his revenge is astonishing. I cannot fathom how Dumas came up with such a scheme. At times, one cringes for the those who wronged the Count. This book made me laugh and cry. There are many poignant moments throughout the book that make you feel good. Anyone who says that Dumas is not up there with the 'classic' writers, does not know what they are talking about. This book is rich in dialogue, mystery, suspense and storyline. All in all, this is an amazing classic, and I recommend it to anyone wanting a good read.
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