Six Dumas Learnings

Mt. Dumas kicking our dumasses

You could blame the snowstorm for our record-low book club turnout on Tuesday, or you could blame Dumas. I stood atop Book Club Everest as the lone member who got through the full, unabridged The Three Musketeers, and most folks didn't make it, even with Sherpas like abridged editions (150 pages, in one case!) and books on tape hauling their behinds toward the summit. (Full disclosure: some of those readers did manage to get through Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo some time back, while I wimped out with a 250-page Bantam edition that was decades old.)

Even with five in attendance, however, Dumas proved educational. Consider these learnings:

1. If it can't be said in 400 pages, does it really need to be said? Granted, I read Musketeers on Kindle, so I only had 13,000+ "locations" to go by, but I crossed that with a Goodreads edition number of 600 pages to get a vague idea where I was on the mountain. I'm getting older and am realizing I may never read another 1000-page book. Because, really, truly, none of this could be left out? We all agreed the lackeys in Musketeers were a giant snore-fest and should be given the red pen. Ditto Aramis' theological disputations. I used to be rabidly anti-abridgements, but I'm coming around.

2. The man is funny. Maybe it comes of being named "Dumas," which, fortunately for Alexandre, didn't provoke all the playground jokes it would have had he gone to school in England. Somehow I don't remember snickering my way through Edmond Dantes' incarceration in the Chateau D'If, but Musketeers had me laughing out loud at least once every thousand locations--excuse me--every 55 pages. 

3. The villain(ess) steals the show. Whenever things were in danger of growing dull, Milady livened it right up. In fact, I can't believe, in the give-a-secondary-character-his-own-novel trend, no one has yet tackled Milady! Yeesh, we've heard about Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Mr. March, Huck Finn's alcoholic father, the first Mrs. Rochester, and every Austen character, however peripheral (too many to link to), but no Milady? If this post doesn't prompt anyone, I may have to try it myself someday.

4. 17th-century French oaths could hardly have relieved anyone's frustration because they're ludicrous. Especially in ALL CAPS as my free Kindle edition had them. They did make for funny emails, though, within our book club. PARDIEU! PESTE! MORBLEU! SANG DIEU!

5. 17th-century Paris was approximately three square blocks. Honestly, the sheer number of times D'Artagnan ran into people or saw people passing by made me draw this conclusion. If I had to draw a map, I'd put the Louvre at the center, M. de Treville's a block away, and each musketeer's lodgings somewhere in between. Mid-block, say. ("Rochefort again! PESTE! I must kill that man!")

6. The best movie adaptation has yet to be made. After a brief discussion of mainly the first 60% of the book (which most had made it through), the five of us settled down to watch the 1973 Michael York-Richard Chamberlain version on Netflix Instant Play. This one garnered 3.5 stars, compared to the most recent adapation that was panned as too-CGI slick. All I can say is, bring on the CGI-slickness, s'il vous plait. In the 1973 version, everyone looked hideously overweight in their costumes, and the sword fights were sweaty, lumbering businesses that smacked of Mixed Martial Arts combats. Whose heart sinks when a sword fight breaks out? Ours did, watching this movie, because we knew we were in for another five minutes of clumsy heaving around, bludgeoning each other until everyone was red in the face and shiny. SANG DIEU!

In a nutshell, we gave the book an average ranking of 6.5-7.0. Most preferred The Count of Monte Cristo. And if you can find an abridged version that comes in around 400 pages, go for it.