Utterly disappointed with Count of Monte Cristo

By paperbackmarket2003

I finished The Count of Monte Cristo last night. It had been sitting on my list for ages, and I only finally started it a couple weeks ago. Honestly, I did not like it at all. My issues with the book are pretty big: - Dumas really doesn’t write women well. Almost every woman in this is so naive and one-note, it was kind of ridiculous. No wonder people say male authors can’t write believable women — this book almost feels like proof of that. Most of the women don’t have any real agency. They’re there to be saved, tricked, or hurt. The one who does try to push back, Eugénie Danglars, is basically treated like she’s trying to get away from being a woman entirely. And Mercedes really annoyed me. She didn’t do anything wrong, and she knows that. But she’s so wrapped up in her love for Edmond that even after he kills her husband and her son is in danger, her last talk with him is still full of praise for him. She tells him there’s no one like him. Like, what? It was so frustrating. Maybe that’s just what Dumas, or people in that era, expected from women. I read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee last month, and Sunja is one of my favorite female characters I’ve read recently. She felt so much fuller and more real, with actual emotional stakes. - The characters are all way too one-note From the villains to the main guy to side characters like Luigi, Lucien, and Maximilien, they all felt really flat. For 1200 pages, there’s barely any change in them, either emotionally or psychologically. Everyone acts the same way from beginning to end, like they’re just there to fill a role instead of being actual people. There are like 100 pages spent making us see how brave, humble, and almost godlike the count is. Then another 100 pages on how awful Danglars is. It got tiring fast. - The endless weird monologues got on my nerves Someone would ask the Count a straight question, and instead of answering, he’d go off into some dramatic, cryptic speech about random abstract stuff. He talks in circles about things that don’t even matter, and everyone around him treats it like genius. The second he shows up, the other characters are already acting like he’s some kind of divine being. We keep being told how stunning he looks, how perfectly he moves, but I never really felt like the book showed why he deserves that kind of reaction. Were people really that shallow back then that rich and attractive automatically meant worship? Near the end, when Maximilien says something about dying, he does it again with another monologue. I got so annoyed and was just like, can you please stop talking? Nothing was stopping him from saying Valentine was alive. He’s easily one of the most narcissistic characters I’ve read in a while. - The ending felt kind of flat The last part just didn’t work for me. I wasn’t really happy with the twist where the Count suddenly falls in love with her foster daughter, not as a daughter anymore but something else. And the supposedly fair, humble, godlike Count still can’t see that Mercedes did nothing wrong and leaves her to suffer. And then there’s Valentin — her father has gone mad, her step brother is dead, and she’s basically just like, fine, whatever, worth it for this two-year love story. It’s one of the most praised classics out there, and I honestly don’t get it. I’ve read a bunch of books from the same period and loved plenty of them, so it’s not like I hate classic literature. A couple months ago I read Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights, and I can’t help comparing them to TCOMC. Those books felt so much more layered and well done. I loved them. Would be interested to hear what others think. P.S. I tend to have pretty extreme reactions to books. Either I love them so much I reread them, or I completely hate them. Hope that’s okay. I used to post on Goodreads, so I’m glad I found this place.