by PBS
Although Dumas gets the credit, he collaborated on The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers (1844) with Auguste Maquet, a writer whose job it was to generate outlines, plots, settings, and sometimes even drafts, while Dumas filled in the gaps, added a dollop of pizzazz, and slapped his name on the cover. As it turns out, Maquet was one of 73 collaborators who helped Dumas keep up with the demand, stay so wildly prolific, and generate the income he needed to support his lavish lifestyle. Without this team Dumas likely wouldn’t have been able to produce the roughly 100,000 pages he’s credited with writing in his lifetime, including novels, plays, romances, journalism, travel writing, history books, and true crime.
Dumas—or Maquet—probably based the Count of Monte Cristo on Pierre Picaud, a 19th-century shoemaker who was falsely accused of treason by three friends who lusted after Picaud’s rich fiancée. All told, Picaud spent 10 years plotting revenge, which he eventually let loose on a massive scale, tricking one friend’s daughter into marrying a criminal and poisoning someone else, among other acts of torture and destruction. Similarly, in Dumas’s novel, Edmond Dantès gets sent to prison for life on charges trumped up by several friends who envy his good fortune. In prison he meets a priest who shares a secret about buried treasure. Dantès eventually escapes, finds the treasure, transforms himself into a count (among other aliases), and returns to his hometown, where the only person to recognize him is his former paramour, Mercédès. Then he systematically achieves vengeance by hurting or destroying every single person who wronged him.
In addition to Picaud, Dumas may also have been thinking about his father when creating the count. Born out of wedlock, the son of a French aristocrat and a slave, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas worked his way up through the military and became the highest-ranking black official of his time. Ultimately, however, he found himself imprisoned in Naples, feeling betrayed when his supposed friends back in France took far too long to come to his aid. Tom Reiss’s book about Dumas (who was also known as Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie), The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
The first cinematic adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo appeared as a silent film in 1908. Since then, the novel has served as the basis for a Garfield cartoon, a Soviet miniseries, and an Argentine telenovela, as well as many other films. The movie Oldboy (2003), for example, changes the setting from 19th-century France to 21st-century South Korea, where a man has been mysteriously imprisoned for 15 years; he too exacts a violent retribution.
The swashbuckling tale satisfies in part because the good guy gets his revenge: a victim of circumstances, Dantès deserves a better life than the one he’s led, and the people he kills are clearly villainous. Nevertheless, the novel poses interesting questions about the criminal-justice system and the moral defensibility of retaliation, leaving us to wonder what would happen to society if everyone sought vengeance when wronged. Dantès ultimately decides that it’s God’s job to offer punishment. Perhaps the story served as a cautionary tale to its writers: fed up with his treatment, Maquet took his case to court rather than taking matters into his own hands, and successfully sued Dumas for more money.
The Vintage Classics cover of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866.
Portrait of author Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, taken in 1865. Born in Moscow in 1821, Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for his socialist politics, reprieved from a death sentence, and sent to Siberia. After a decade in exile, he returned to Saint Petersburg and took up the pen.
Illustration for Crime and Punishment by artist Baron Klodt Mikhail Petrovich, from the collection of the Russian State Library, Moscow.
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 1866
When it comes to 19th-century Russian novels, readers tend to split along two lines: those who favor the high church of Tolstoy, filled with sweeping social epics, and those who worship at the altar of the more emotional Dostoyevsky, draped as it is with tragic tales of the individual. And no one is more tragic than Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, as he commits an awful act of violence and must suffer the spiritual, moral, and physical consequences.
Once a promising student, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov has fallen on hard times. He decides to rob and kill Alyona Ivanovna, a pawnbroker with whom he’s transacted on occasion in his Saint Petersburg neighborhood. He meets a man on a drinking binge, who tells Raskolnikov about his daughter, Sonya, recently turned into a prostitute to support their family. Raskolnikov reasons that he’ll be doing the world two good deeds with his murder: ridding the city of an evil creature, and using her money to benefit others—an almost-perfect encapsulation of utilitarianism, a philosophy that privileges any action that is useful and, on balance, promotes happiness. The plan goes awry immediately when Alyona’s sister walks in, so Raskolnikov kills her as well, even though she’s absolutely innocent. As he interacts with Sonya, his sister, his mother, and others, Raskolnikov must decide whether to confess.
True to its title, Crime and Punishment begins with a crime and concludes with an official punishment. The middle of the long novel, on the other hand, details the effect of the wrongdoing on its perpetrator, which itself constitutes a form of punishment. Raskolnikov believes himself to be superior to everyone else and therefore that society’s norms, rules, and morality don’t apply to him. Nevertheless, every time someone mentions the murder in his presence, he panics or faints, thereby telegraphing his guilt. At various points he slides along a spectrum of mental instability from a bit touched to totally insane, but continues to wrestle, rationally and lucidly, with philosophy. Dostoyevsky balances the two halves of the book such that Raskolnikov transitions from a distant, proud misanthrope to a more humble man capable of empathy.
Born in Moscow in 1821, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wanted to be a writer from a young age. After becoming involved in socialist politics, he was arrested in 1849, thrown in prison, and sentenced to death. When he arrived at the execution, he and members of his political group discovered that it was a ruse meant to inflict psychological torture; instead of dying, he was being exiled to Siberia, where he would serve time in a labor camp. He returned to Saint Petersburg in 1859 a changed man, aware of “how much strength the human personality possesses to create the conditions under which it can survive amidst the worst adversity,” according to biographer Joseph Frank.
Dostoyevsky wrote at a furious pace. Crime and Punishment was serialized in 1866, then later published as a stand-alone work. As he gained success and fame, he developed a gambling problem, forcing his family into debt, and suffered from a rare form of epilepsy. Versions of these twin torments manifest in many of his books, which feature characters plagued by mental and physical illnesses. In spite of their hardships, some manage to find dignity and even gladness in day-to-day existence, a possibility reinforced by Dostoyevsky’s deeply held religious beliefs. Dostoyevsky died in 1881, at age 59, but left behind a huge body of work, including novels like The Idiot (1868–1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880), along with journalism, essays, short stories, and poems.
Before the rise of psychology as a science, people turned to novels to learn about the personalities and proclivities of their fellow man. Crime and Punishment stands as one of the most masterful portraits of psychosis ever published. A cautionary tale, it tells you what you need to know about how an ethical and moral transgression might very well drive someone mad.
#RebelReader
FREQUENTLY BANNED BOOKS
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a moral or an immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” Not everyone agrees: banning books, or at least trying to, has a long history not only in totalitarian regimes but in societies that pride themselves on their freedoms. Books get banned for all sorts of reasons, from profanity to politics to religion. What some see as broad-minded and
realistic, others see as offensive and damaging.
Some books are challenged even as they’re celebrated. When The Grapes of Wrath came out in 1939, it received critical accolades, among them the Pulitzer Prize, and became a bestseller. But it was also banned in several parts of the United States, including Kern County, California, where the fictional Joads wound up after leaving Oklahoma. The California county’s board of supervisors took issue with Steinbeck’s portrayal of the migrants and their treatment, denounced the book as “libel and lie,” and forbade it from being shelved in libraries and schools in the area. (The ban was lifted 18 months later.)
Being part of the canon never seems to preclude a book from censorship. Widely seen as a foundational text within Chicano literature, Bless Me, Ultima has been routinely and roundly criticized for its portrayal of homosexuality, its raw language, and its sensitive depiction of indigenous beliefs. People who seek to ban or censor books often envision themselves as protecting impressionable minds. Some parents, upon discovering that their children are being exposed to the violence of Beloved or The Call of the Wild, the racism of To Kill a Mockingbird, or the critique of racism of Invisible Man, complain to local school boards, sometimes resulting in the book in question being struck from classroom reading lists.
Few books come under as intense scrutiny as those written for children and teens. The Harry Potter series had to cope with charges of Satanism. Other books, like Looking for Alaska and The Diary of Anne Frank, are periodically deemed too sexually explicit, with some fearing that risqué content might encourage readers to experiment. Offensive language is another oft-cited reason for keeping a book out of the hands of a young person, as is the catchall category of “unsuited to any age group.”
Yet banning books inevitably backfires. The Catcher in the Rye has been repeatedly banned, for reasons ranging from “antiwhite” bias to “excess vulgar language” to a lack of morality in its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. During its most intense censorship in the 1960s and 1970s, some teachers were fired for assigning the book to students. It didn’t help when Mark David Chapman claimed that the novel influenced him to murder John Lennon in 1980. All this controversy has arguably cemented the novel’s place on syllabi of high-school English classes, and it continues to sell some 250,000 copies every year.
More recently, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time came under fire for “taking of God’s name in vain.” The Hunger Games trilogy has been kept off shelves for being “anti-family” and “anti-ethnic.” The Lovely Bones has been criticized for “dubious morals” and its religious themes, the latter a reason some have given for taking both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Da Vinci Code out of circulation. There are those who seek to ban the Koran and the Torah. In an ironic twist on Wilde’s quip, Fifty Shades of Grey has been challenged for being “poorly written.”
Responding to ongoing efforts to remove or limit access to titles, the American Library Association created Banned Books Week in 1982. Participating libraries put up themed displays, promoting previously banned books and supporting “the freedom to read.” The internet makes it easier than ever to find works that might be missing from the local library for whatever reason, and social media, with its hashtags like #RebelReader, encourages people to read widely and deeply. Without the lively discourse that comes from diverse viewpoints, even those that might be distasteful or troubling to us, democracy dies. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four goes into a fair amount of detail about just such a situation—probably why it’s the fifth-most-banned book of all time.
Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima was banned for portraying homosexuality, graphic language, and depictions of indigenous beliefs.
Jack London’s The Call of the Wild was banned after concerned parents complained about its violence.
Hardcover dust jacket of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, published in 2003.
Author Mark Haddon at the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival in Scotland. Born in England in 1962, Haddon worked with differently abled children before becoming a writer.
Actor Graham Butler as Christopher Boone in London’s National Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which ended its run in June 2017.
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THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
Mark Haddon · 2003
Demonstrating sensitivity toward those with mental and physical disorders, Mark Haddon never names the precise condition that drives his main character’s behavior. Readers of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), however, might notice 15-year-old Christopher’s differences starting from the book’s first chapter, numbered as it is with a 2, rather than a 1. Christopher John Francis Boone knows every prime number through 7,057, as well as the name and capital of every country in the world, but he’s unable to appreciate emotions beyond happy or sad, and he lacks the capacity for empathy. Haddon decided not to label Christopher as a way of showing that his protagonist is so much more than his symptoms.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time begins at seven minutes after midnight, when Christopher discovers the murder of his neighbor’s poodle, Wellington. After suspicion falls on him, Christopher sets about trying to determine the true culprit, a project that forces him to interact with his Swindon neighbors and uncover the answers to other mysteries. He learns of his father’s affair with Mrs. Shears, Wellington’s owner, which heated up in response to the relationship between Mr. Shears and Christopher’s mother, before she disappeared from Christopher’s life. He thinks she’s dead.
Christopher writes The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as part of a school assignment. He takes his title from “Silver Blaze,” an 1892 story about Sherlock Holmes. In it, the master detective realizes that a dog’s silence offers the clue to the crime: the dog didn’t bark because he knew the person sneaking around the horse stables that night. Like Holmes, Christopher values cool logic and precise deductions; he populates his narrative with facts about astronauts, technology, and other subjects that rely on such tools, and he greatly admires Holmes. Even as Christopher tries to use reason to solve Wellington’s murder, he discovers, and starts to understand, the illogic of emotion and of life.
Haddon spent many years working with differently abled children before becoming a full-time children’s-book writer. He also wrote for a popular UK television show. He was born in England in 1962 and graduated from Oxford in 1981. Since the publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, his first book written for an adult audience, Haddon has mostly continued to write books for grown-ups. In the United Kingdom, the book came out in two editions simultaneously—and unusually—with one marketed to adults and one to teens; both were bestsellers and award winners, taking home such accolades as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year. The appeal of Haddon’s book points to the now-blurred lines between YA fiction and adult fiction. Thanks to the massive success of novels by J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, John Green, and Stephenie Meyer, among others, books about teens are finding a much broader audience.
In 2012, the novel became a play, premiering in London’s West End and winning seven Olivier Awards, before transferring to Broadway, where it won both the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the Tony Award for Best Play. During the course of its New York City run, the play employed some 20 puppies, all of which were adopted postproduction. The novel ends just as happily. Christopher may be unusual, but the world would be a better place if everyone were a little more like him—cognizant of their own strengths and weaknesses, determined to combat their limitations and achieve their goals, curious about and open to new, if occasionally scary, experiences.
Cover for the first edition of The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003.
Portrait of author Dan Brown, taken for Paris Match in London in 2016. Before he wrote his bestselling debut novel, he was a singer-songwriter.
A working “crypt
ex” made for the 2006 Columbia Pictures film The Da Vinci Code.
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THE DA VINCI CODE
Dan Brown · 2003
Among the by-products of the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) are a rise in tourism in Rome and Paris, a spike in interest in early religious history, and—thanks to sales of his book as well as books denouncing its portrayal of Christianity—a big boost to the publishing industry. Dan Brown’s thriller also sent readers searching for the Holy Grail.
On vacation in Tahiti in 1994, Brown experienced an “I can do that” moment while reading a thriller, and he started writing when he returned home. The Da Vinci Code was his fourth novel, and his second to feature Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology (the fictional study of symbols). Its incredible success propelled his previous books onto the bestseller list. Today, Brown is one of the most popular and highest-grossing novelists in the world. He continues to write about Langdon, and has published three more novels to date featuring this protagonist: The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013), and Origin (2017). In 2016, he released a version of The Da Vinci Code aimed at young adults.
When the original novel begins, Langdon is at the Louvre to investigate the death of curator Jacques Saunière, who wrote a series of enigmatic messages in blood before dying. Sophie Neveu, a cryptographer and Saunière’s estranged granddaughter, arrives and realizes that the police suspect Langdon. Together they interpret Saunière’s strange clues, which force the pair to undergo a whirlwind hunt through France and Britain, art history and theology. The Da Vinci Code puts its protagonists through the proverbial wringer: car chases, gunfire, villains disguised as sympathetic friends. But it also offers a compelling mystery coupled with a tantalizing bit of romance at the very end, and the byzantine, centuries-long conspiracy at its heart appeals to readers’ desire for an ordered world, even if that order is enigmatic and sinister.