Week in review: Week to 6 September

[pedanther]

. My login to borrow ebooks from the library had stopped working for no apparent reason, which happens several times a year and almost always just means that it's been a while since I borrowed a book in person and the library computer wants me to go in and confirm that I'm still a local resident and active library user. (I had to figure that out from first principles the first time it happened; I don't know why they can't display a message explaining what's going on. Well, probably because the ebook library is a third-party system and it would be some flavour of Too Hard.) Accordingly, I went in to the library to see if anything caught my eye that I could borrow and prove my continued existence. One of the first things that caught my eye, on the display of New and Popular Books near the front desk, was the third volume of Claire North's recent trilogy about what Odysseus' wife Penelope had to deal with while he was off having the Odyssey, which I'd heard about somewhere a while ago and thought might be interesting. While I was browsing through the shelves I found that the library had the first two volumes as well, so I decided to borrow the first one, Ithaca, and see how it went.

. Last year, I started listening to Re: Dracula, the audio drama version of Dracula Daily, but gave up on it a little way into September for a number of reasons, including general Having Too Much to Keep Up With and a more specific Fed Up With All the Ads. I decided that this year, having a bit more mental and emotional bandwidth to spare, I'd pick up where I left off (or actually, a few episodes before, to start at a suitable inflection point in the narrative), and so far it's going pretty well. There are still All the Ads, but I'm coping with them better (and being more ruthless about just skipping through them, since at this point even if there was an ad for something I was actually interested in I would probably avoid it out of spite).

. I've been doing a project for a while now, posting on Tumblr, where I go through The Count of Monte Cristo chapter by chapter and note everything the text says about when the events take place. The hope was at the end of it I would have a set of information I could assemble into a proper timeline that would be useful for future reference, but I am confounded at every turn. And, mark you, it's not that Dumas doesn't give dates, it's that he seems incapable of giving a date without contradicting himself: the most important event in the novel is given no fewer than three different dates in different chapters (and, on one occasion, two different dates within the same scene); the only character who has a birth date explicitly stated has two different explictly-stated birth dates; the date that a week-long event begins is two days after the date that it ends. I still want to present my findings in some kind of useful reference document, but at this point I don't have any idea what form such a thing would take.

. My current standby book, for when I need a couple of pages to keep my reading streak going but don't feel up to anything too involving, is Try Whistling This, a collection of essays about music by the composer and music critic (and host of Radio National's The Music Show) Andrew Ford. One of the essays I've read so far was about the role of nostalgia in popular music, and how musicians who were considered rebellious and dangerous in their heyday, like Elvis and Beethoven, wind up being sold as nice and comforting. (Which reminded me of the time I heard a choir sing "Imagine" at a memorial service, in between a hymn and the Lord's Prayer, and found myself reflecting that it's become so familiar that it's now possible for the words to pass through people without slowing down.)

. Too tired to elaborate, but Natural Six is really very good.

Comments

[igenlode]

Somehow this does not surprise me about Dumas :)

(Was "Count of Monte Cristo" one of the ones he did as a serial and then assembled into a published novel? Might account for a lot of inconsistencies...)

[pedanther]

Yes, it was a serial first.

There's also the thing where Dumas originally started writing it from what ended up as Chapter 31, and then decided he needed to start the story earlier and circled back to do the first 30 chapters; there are some notable examples of the first section of the book asserting something and then being contradicted later on.

[igenlode]

That's... intriguing (given that the escape from the Chateau d'If is about the only bit that anyone remembers nowadays -- or maybe that was just my various abridged versions as a child!)
So it was originally conceived as The Adventures of Albert de Morcerf and the Mysterious Stranger, with Monte Cristo's backstory invented later?

[pedanther]

The outlines of Monte Cristo's backstory were always there, but not in anything like as much detail; the original idea, I gather, was to give a relatively brief explanation of his backstory somewhere near the climax of the novel, I think just after Mercedes tells him that she knows who he is, and to spend the novel up to that point presenting him as an enigma while dropping the occasional hint about his history and motivations.

But then Dumas decided that it would be better for the audience to meet Edmond Dantes first, and witness the details of what he went through, before showing what came of it.

I think history has proved that to be the right call; the Count of Monte Cristo would have been a less compelling character on the original plan - and, as you say, then we wouldn't have got the Chateau d'If sequence which is the bit that everybody remembers.

[igenlode]

Definitely the right decision; all the vague and elaborate business about telegraph stations and Benedetto etc. is incredibly unmemorable in comparison. And the Count would come across as a very unsympathetic character; he is not particularly sympathetic as it is --which I think Dumas realised, since he depicts him suffering from temporary remorse after his vengeance with its massive collateral damage is accomplished-- but at least we get to undergo alongside him first all the unspeakable sufferings that drove him to such lengths. (I must say he was very lucky; Edmond Dantes had no way of knowing that Villefort would subsequently father an illegtimate child on the woman whom Danglars would quite coincidentally go on to marry, or that Fernand would get himself mixed up in Turco-Greek politics, creating public vulnerabilities to be exploited that were nothing to do with his actual original grudge against them... although I suppose you could argue that these actions were part and parcel of the moral weakness that caused them to assist in Dantes' incarceration in the first place.)