I have read the first chapter. I am not finding the language difficult, which is good. There are a couple of words I don't understand, but I get their meaning from context.
I expect it will stay that way.
It is already very interesting. I knew very little about his early years (only a little about his father).
She does a good job at summarizing his early life, and later his literary life. In a way, it's better and more "lively" than the source she summarizes. It's nice to discover how his background may have influenced him, there's no mystery to the fact he liked village inns as locations so much when you know how and by who he was raised.
Another point of interest is to discover how different Dumas's background is from that of the French writers of his time and before. Before Dumas, at least in France, you pretty much had to have financial independance, or live off the fruits of mecenate, to be a writer. Dumas was one of the first to have to struggle with the "modern" constraints of commercial success and popularity put on novelists - the only thing still missing from the picture is a "creative editor".
Indeed.
I am also amused by the sometime similarity between Dumas and d'Artagnan around the July Revoution. I wonder to what extent that is her seeing Dumas through the glasses of his characters, and to what extent it would make sense to see the influence going the other way (you know I am very sceptical of biographical readings). At any rate, it made me giggle.
*MySmiley*
structured procrastinator
structured procrastinator
Simone Bertière - Dumas et les Mousquetaires
- 09/05/2011 09:49:15 PM
7659 Views
I need this book.
- 10/05/2011 04:51:17 PM
1552 Views
Re: I need this book.
- 11/05/2011 12:44:23 AM
1653 Views
Re: I need this book.
- 11/05/2011 09:58:27 AM
2175 Views
Which of the three books do you like more, Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, or Le Vicomte? NM
- 11/05/2011 07:54:44 AM
1568 Views
Aaand I started it. Damn.
- 20/05/2011 08:39:42 PM
1354 Views
Re: Aaand I started it. Damn.
- 26/05/2011 02:51:31 PM
1433 Views
Re: Aaand I started it. Damn.
- 26/05/2011 02:55:11 PM
1461 Views