Alexandre Dumas
Language: Vietnamese
Amazon ISBN
Literature & Fiction classics
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Published: Jan 2, 2010
Starred Review. This first English translation of the last, previously unknown novel by Dumas (1802–1870) offers a stunning completion to his fictional mapping of French history. The plot centers on Compte Hector de Sainte Hermine, a royalist captured and imprisoned by Bonaparte. Part one finds him caught in the political intrigue of 1801–1804, as Napoleon moves from first consul to emperor. In part two, Hector, now known as René, is released from jail; he signs onto a French corsair as a common seaman, but his noble birth, superb education and martial abilities soon elevate him in rank. The next 300 pages slosh with swashbuckling sea adventure, casting heroic romance against the background of Napoleon's ultimate fall. It's Dumas at his best, but alloyed: asides; minibiographies; commentaries on fashion, manners, geography and history; and flashbacks pile up unendingly, leavened with farcical humor and witty punditry. Although it lacks the polish of The Three Musketeers and the concision of The Count of Monte Cristo , this capacious, rambling, unfinished account of the Napoleonic era represents vintage Dumas and an intensely personal vision of the time. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This long-lost novel by the nineteenth-century master of the swashbuckler was discovered in decidedly twentieth-century fashion, on microfilm in the National Library in Paris. A breathless seven hundred and fifty pages, the unfinished manuscript nominally concerns a young velvet-suited nobleman "whose pallor bespoke a strange destiny": to redeem his family’s Royalist past, he must serve as a common sailor on a corsair. But Dumas seems only intermittently interested in his hero, lingering instead on Napoleon, still an emperor-in-waiting, bemoaning his marriage to spendthrift Josephine ("I shall keep divorce legal in France, if only so I can leave that woman"). Amid stagecoach heists, assassination attempts, and the occasional tiger hunt, sudden details gleam: a condemned aristocrat requests the services of a barber en route to the scaffold; a lovelorn girl conspires to commit suicide by snakebite. Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker
Description:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This first English translation of the last, previously unknown novel by Dumas (1802–1870) offers a stunning completion to his fictional mapping of French history. The plot centers on Compte Hector de Sainte Hermine, a royalist captured and imprisoned by Bonaparte. Part one finds him caught in the political intrigue of 1801–1804, as Napoleon moves from first consul to emperor. In part two, Hector, now known as René, is released from jail; he signs onto a French corsair as a common seaman, but his noble birth, superb education and martial abilities soon elevate him in rank. The next 300 pages slosh with swashbuckling sea adventure, casting heroic romance against the background of Napoleon's ultimate fall. It's Dumas at his best, but alloyed: asides; minibiographies; commentaries on fashion, manners, geography and history; and flashbacks pile up unendingly, leavened with farcical humor and witty punditry. Although it lacks the polish of The Three Musketeers and the concision of The Count of Monte Cristo , this capacious, rambling, unfinished account of the Napoleonic era represents vintage Dumas and an intensely personal vision of the time. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
This long-lost novel by the nineteenth-century master of the swashbuckler was discovered in decidedly twentieth-century fashion, on microfilm in the National Library in Paris. A breathless seven hundred and fifty pages, the unfinished manuscript nominally concerns a young velvet-suited nobleman "whose pallor bespoke a strange destiny": to redeem his family’s Royalist past, he must serve as a common sailor on a corsair. But Dumas seems only intermittently interested in his hero, lingering instead on Napoleon, still an emperor-in-waiting, bemoaning his marriage to spendthrift Josephine ("I shall keep divorce legal in France, if only so I can leave that woman"). Amid stagecoach heists, assassination attempts, and the occasional tiger hunt, sudden details gleam: a condemned aristocrat requests the services of a barber en route to the scaffold; a lovelorn girl conspires to commit suicide by snakebite.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker