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As I have mentioned before, I have been listening to The Count of Monte Cristo on Audiobook for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, I stopped. Care to know why?

(Fair warning: Massive amounts of spoilers ahead.)

The book is about the trials and tribulations of a young man named Edmond Dantes. At least, that is his name as the story starts, as he is given a number of aliases throughout:

Edmond Dantes

This is the wide-eyed youth as we first meet him. About to become captain on a ship, loved by his crew, adored by his friends and enamored with a young woman with whom he is about to marry. Things are really looking up for this guy when, alas, he’s thrown into a cold dark cell for the rest of his life.

Number 34

Now imprisoned, Number 34 struggles with captivity. At one point, he vows to kill himself with starvation, until he hears sounds coming from behind the walls. That noise happens to be a wise old man, who reveals the happy-go-lucky Dantes to be… well… an ignorant dullard. Here Edmond has been stuck for years on end in a solitary cell with nothing to do but think, and he hasn’t been able to piece together the story of how he ended up in prison. The old man hears his story once, and instantly puts it all together for him. Way to go, hero. Very impressive.

We then learn that the old man is brilliant in every way. He’s a walking encyclopedia, making tools out of nothing and paper out of even less. (Think Matlock meets MacGyver.) Since he’s memorized so many books, he teaches Dantes, well, everything there is to possibly know. When he’s done, Edmund the Cypher has magically become a MENSA candidate. But the real kicker is, he is told about a mass of wealth, hidden away on the deserted island of Monte Cristo.

(By the way, I also have issue with exactly how much wealth is actually contained in this treasure. Honestly, I think Dumas goes a little overboard with what two Cardinals could actually amass and then sneak into a cave. According to Wikipedia, the fortune, in today’s dollars, would equal about $11 billion.)

Secret Anonymous Dantes

After escaping (the method of which is the highlight of the book thus far), Dantes assumes a few identities in the grand process of:

1. Getting the money
2. Locating his old friends, and new enemies

Once he gets the gold (by means of another excellent segment), Dantes goes to the house of his old boss, M. Morrel. Morrel owes a great deal of money, has lost all but one of his ships, and is in a very bad spot indeed. So Dantes buys out the man’s largest debt from a banker, and goes to see him, pretending to be the loan officer.

Sinbad the Sailor *chuckle*

This is where I had to stop listening. When leaving Morrel’s house after giving him a three month extension, he declares, in secret, to Morrel’s daughter that one day a letter will come, and she is to follow the instructions in it explicitly. The author to-be of this forthcoming letter? Sinbad the Sailor.

As I see it, this is about the equivalent of me coming to your place, and telling you that I’m Batman.

“Sinbad” then goes and hides more than enough money to pay the debt off in town. The letter tells the daughter where to find it, but isn’t sent until the morning the payment is due. While the daughter runs off to follow the instructions, Morrel sits upstairs, fully prepared to kill himself rather than face the bill collectors.

(Then again, the man’s son doesn’t even try that hard to change his father’s suicidal thoughts, so I don’t know what that says about him either.)

Why didn’t Edmund cut the drama and just let the poor man off of the hook that much sooner? Morrel was going to make Dantes captain of his boat, and he can’t afford him that simple relief? He rewarded ol’ drunkard Caderousse with a diamond worth 50,000 francs just for telling him a brief history of events, but his freaking mentor, he leaves hanging out to dry? Pissed me off.

The last part of the story I could bear to listen to was “Sinbad” entertaining a man who landed on his island in order to shoot goats. Over an extravagant dinner, he gives an overbearing, pretentious performance, causing my eyes to roll and mind to wander. The kicker here is that not only does his guest not laugh upon hearing his host’s silly name, he actually gives himself the moniker of “Aladdin”…

So there you have it. I stopped “reading” the book because the main character got on my nerves. Of course, the possibility remains that it all could have easily gotten better. Then again, I had already committed fifteen hours to the story and was only a third of the way through it. Ultimately, I opted to not invest my time any further.

NEXT!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Rants.
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