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I had read Three Musketeers as a kid and enjoyed it, but I figured I should give it another go. I found that the "heroes" in it are considerably less heroic when seen as an adult. They're a bunch of bullies who treat their servants and the women unfortunate to love them absolutely abominably. The swashbuckling bits were still fun, of course.
We read some of Count of Monte Cristo in French in high school French class, but I had forgotten how little of it we actually read. The bits in prison are great, and there are some great moments of the Count showing deep moral understanding at the end of the book when he forgoes completing some of his terrible vengeance when he realizes it would only hurt the innocent. But in the middle? Oof. Dumas never managed to make me actually care about the circle of French nobility caught up in his machinations. They were boring twits, for the most part. While I'm glad the Count was able to see the futility of vengeance, it was hard to shake the feeling that I should care about everyone else just because they were rich.
But of all of these, it turns out I knew the plot of The Man in the Iron Mask least of all. I felt like maybe Dumas was trolling people with this one? Burning everything down in the least heroic or laudable way possible, so no one would ever ask him to return to these characters? It's nothing more than a series of terrible decisions and pointless deaths by characters who have far too much power to even begin to feel sympathetic.
We read some of Count of Monte Cristo in French in high school French class, but I had forgotten how little of it we actually read. The bits in prison are great, and there are some great moments of the Count showing deep moral understanding at the end of the book when he forgoes completing some of his terrible vengeance when he realizes it would only hurt the innocent. But in the middle? Oof. Dumas never managed to make me actually care about the circle of French nobility caught up in his machinations. They were boring twits, for the most part. While I'm glad the Count was able to see the futility of vengeance, it was hard to shake the feeling that I should care about everyone else just because they were rich.
But of all of these, it turns out I knew the plot of The Man in the Iron Mask least of all. I felt like maybe Dumas was trolling people with this one? Burning everything down in the least heroic or laudable way possible, so no one would ever ask him to return to these characters? It's nothing more than a series of terrible decisions and pointless deaths by characters who have far too much power to even begin to feel sympathetic.
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TM struck me insofar as he had to tell the reader that morals and what was considered socially acceptable had changed and some of what he was writing had to be read with that in mind, which I thought was an interesting meta-note.