#robin buss

I decided to do Monte Cristo daily again and three days in I'm being reminded why I didn't finish before: I'm finding the entries lengthy and unengaging. I know it's one of your favorite stories and I wonder whether you can recommend a translation that a modern reader might not find so dry and heavy.

The growth of the nineteenth-century metropolis led to a whole literature of the urban life, later exploited on film, in which the city is no longer seen as a place of civilized, ‘urbane’ living and safety from attack, but as a menacing sub-world, in which human beings prey on one another or suffer fearful bouts of loneliness, alienation, and ennui. A machine devised to supply every need of civilized humanity in one place has become a monster enclosing every form of vice and depravity. Only in England did murder continue to take place in country houses.

“Dumas’ first, vital departure from Peuchet is to make Monte Cristo only indirectly the avenger: his ‘victims’ are all, in reality, destroyed by their own past misdeeds which Monte Cristo uncovers.

'Senseless!' he said. 'The day when I resolved to take my revenge ... senseless, not to have torn out my heart!'

Maximilien, the friends whom we have lost do not rest in the earth, they are buried in our hearts, and that is how God wanted it, so that we should always be in their company. I have two friends who are always with me, in that way: one is the man who gave me life, the other is the one who gave me understanding. The spirit of both lives in me. I consult them when I am in doubt and, if I have done any good, I owe it to their advice.