第一篇：Count of Monte Cristo book review
Count of Monte Cristo book review
JinHua No.4 middle school Grade 3 Class 15 Name:XuKangshan
Instructor:Wu Huizhen
I've reviewed this book before.I'm writing another review of it now so that it will appear on my list of reviews next to my review of the butchered 2002 screen adaptation of this epic work.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.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.
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