The basic story is that Edmond Dantes is a young, optimistic, up-and-coming sailor in Southern France. He is about to be married to the love of his life, Mercedes, when some rivals in business and love conspire to get him thrown into jail. In an instant, Edmond loses everything. He is driven to despair and insanity in prison, but is eventually saved by a fellow prisoner--the Abbe Faria. Faria teaches Edmond everything he knows, and they manage to figure out why Edmond ended up in prison. Finally, before he dies, Abbe Faria tells Edmond about an immense treasure on the uninhabited, rocky island of Monte Cristo. Edmond then makes a daring escape, finds the treasure, and begins a new life.
Edmond gets out of prison a very different person than the one that came in. His father is dead, and his fiancé is married to another man. His rosy outlook on life is gone, and he is bent on revenge. This was the part of the book where I started to lose interest for a number of reasons. First, Edmond is a much less likeable character. His humanity seems to be gone, he throws money around in a lavish fashion, he bought a slave (but waited until after his tongue was cut out, so he can't talk), and he's kind of shitty to his servants. Second, the characters who put Edmond in prison have all gotten older, gotten married, and had kids. Their names have changed from some French name to another French name that I had a hard time keeping track of. Finally, the characters are unreliable narrators, which made following the narrative even more challenging. I almost stopped reading the book at this point. Finally, I went to Wikipedia and made a list of all the characters and how they relate to each other and kept it with the book.
The character-cheat-sheet helped a lot, and I regained interest as I read. Storylines that felt like random tangents all came back together in the end, and I'm glad I finished the book. Edmond did become a little more likeable as I continued to read, although I got tired of him constantly pretending that his actions came from God. I do see why this book is a classic. I'm impressed that Dumas could keep everything together, tie everything up in the end, and consistently make me feel for the characters.
Just a couple more points: First, if someone wanted to do some deep study, I think it would be interesting to look into Dumas's portrayal of some of the female characters. Mercedes, Edmond's fiancé would be an obvious first choice. Haydee, who was purchased as a slave by Edmond when she was a child and becomes his love interest (definitely creeped me out a little) would be another.
But the most interesting women to me were the two daughters of Edmond's nemeses: Valentine Villefort is supposedly the epitome of the perfect woman and the love interest of Maximilian Morrel, a very deserving young man. But she is so weak and passive, she drove me crazy! When she loves Max but her father wants her to marry someone else, she does nothing to stand up for herself. When she finds out her stepmother is trying to kill her she meekly submits to everything the Count of Monte Cristo tells her without even asking what's going to happen. On the other side is Eugenie Danglars, who is beautiful and accomplished, but she is also willful and a lesbian. She defies her father and does what she wants. To me, she is a much more satisfying character. She is not held up by Dumas as any kind of example, but she also isn't vilified as much as she could have been. I'm curious what the viewpoints on lesbians were at that time, and what Dumas's were in particular, and how those helped form the character of Eugenie.
I have one final comment on the Penguin Classics paperback version of the book I read. There were endnotes throughout the book that were insanely annoying. A giant book is hard enough to hold when you're reading, but trying to hold your spot and flip through pages at the end while looking for an endnote every couple of pages was a pain in the ass. Every once in a while, the end notes were interesting. Sometimes they just said, see Footnote in such and such other chapter, and then the flipping began again. And after all that work, it wasn't even helpful. If this book needs notes at all, they should be footnotes. I feel very strongly about this.
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