Tag: meta fiction

The Count of Monte Cristo, for the last time

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Part 6 in what I had originally intended to be four parts 

The plot 

Or,

Edmond Dantes; If God didn’t want me to do this he’d have killed me by now

Who we are to analyze and revenge ourselves upon in this section: The de Villefort family. Holy Shit. Let’s break this down as best I can.

Monsieur De Villefort Villefort is described in the novel as the type of person who “would sacrifice anything to his ambition, even his own father.” He is primo dick, and not in complimentary way.  Throughout the novel, whenever something  might threaten his social climbing, he’s ready to destroy it. His initial attack against Dantes is the one most driven by political gain. When Dantès has a letter from the island of Elba, where Napoleon is confined, to be delivered to Villefort’s father, he has Dantès imprisoned in Chateau d’If and personally destroys the evidence. Indirectly, he is responsible for Dantes’ father starving to death.

During Dantès’ fourteen years of imprisonment, Villefort rises to Deputy Minister of France. He has also made a politically advantageous marriage and has one daughter, Valentine. He later takes a second wife and has one son, Edouard. He also has had an affair with a woman who becomes the Baroness Danglars, and Villefort uses his wife’s family mansion (Monte Cristo later purchases this mansion) to conceal his mistress (the woman who will become Madame Danglars) while she is pregnant. When the child is born, Villefort announces that the child is stillborn and takes the child in a box to the garden, where he plans to bury him alive.

Villefort is, by all accounts, the villain of the novel.

Benedetto, the baby in question, is stolen by a smuggler assuming that Villefort is burying treasure and he’s very important to Dantes’ eventual plan.

Monsieur Noirtier Villefort’s father, the Bonapartist that threatens his political rise. He is a sympathetic , all but disabled character with whom only Valentine is able to competently speak. Presumably by the time of the revenge plot he’s had a series of strokes. The attempts of Madam de Villefort to kill her stepdaughter mean there is a poison plot where Nortier attempts to intervene but he is rendered mute by his disease. (Yes, there’s a large poison subplot.  Her stepmother thinks if they kill the daughter, who’s set to inherit from her mother’s estate, then everything will revert to them. A disguised Dantes gives her the idea, even. These people just have a lot going on).

Monsieur Noirtier tries to warn about the plots surrounding Valentine because of her pending inheritance. Ultimately without Valentine this family is fucked.

Valentine De Villefort  Juliet, aka Romeo and Juliet. We’re going to poison her but it’s okay, she gets to be with her beau in the end because Dantes is going to stop him from killing himself and reveal that the poison is just a sedative.

Valentine, like Edouard, Albert, and Eugenie, represents innocents. People pulled in by the machinations of their evil parents and therefore people whom Dantes identified with and is willing to alter his plans around.

The Morrel family, and the fact that Valentine is in love with Maximilian, represents the ultimate source of goodness for Dantes. By reuniting the lovers and protecting them, he undoes some of the damage done to him when he was the young and innocent one being corrupted by the adults of the novel and separated from his betrothed.

Héloise, the second Madame de Villefort Hates her step kid, really easy to convince that killing her is a dope idea.  After a rash of poisonings of anyone  that stands in the political way of the family, it becomes obvious that her earlier conversation with the disguised Dantes took. Later, when her husband accuses her of the poisonings and demands that she commit suicide or else face public execution, she poisons both herself and their nine-year-old son.

Edouard ‘s death is the one that Dantes hadn’t forseen. It works outside of his plans and causes him to panic at what he’s done.

Edouard De Villefort The nine-year-old son of the de Villeforts. When they find his body, Dantes panics and tries to revive him, ultimately leaving him for Villefort to find.

Now, let’s get back to the Benedetto kid. The one they try to force Eugenie to marry before she runs away to be a lesbian. The one Dantes dresses up and calls Cavalcanti.  All of that is revealed at a trial where Villefort is presiding as head deputy for the state.

Villefort, the social climber, is broken down in and by a court case he presides over that reveals everything he’s done to the public while he watches.

He leaves the trial, flees really, to apologize to his wife and convince her not to kill herself. He’s just as evil as her, after all, and there’s no reputation to protect anymore, except instead he finds her and Edouard dead.

Now, chronologically this doesn’t fit here, but to tie the whole book together,  the revenge is complete. Haidee, you remember Haidee? Haidee admits she never seduced Albert very effectively because she’s in love with Monte Cristo. Dantes, who doesn’t really know how to be a normal person anymore, realizes it and speculates on if he’s even capable of being Edmond Dantes anymore. Regardless, with his revenge complete, the children (all but Edouard and Benedetto) on better life paths, and the responsible parties all punished, he decides to try.

He and Haidee sail away together.

And *that* is the plot of the Count of Monte Cristo.

Review: Poison for Breakfast

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I would call it atmospheric.

The atmosphere is both circular logic and literary nonsense, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense and not the dismissive way which we say ‘nonsense’ casually.
Poison for Breakfast is not a novel. It’s a meditation on the nature of storytelling in the guise of a story.


Sort of, kind of, ‘Poison for Breakfast’ is about consuming poison and trying to work backwards to figure out how you’d gotten to the point of being poisoned. Snicket is given a note informing him that he has been poisoned and now he, as a reliably known mystery solver, must solve the mystery of this suddenly appeared note, his poisoning, and therefore his apparent murder.


He doesn’t actually tell you very much at all, buried in convoluted Lemony Snicket-ism upon Lemony Snicket-ism, meditating on the nature of storytelling. He tells various non sequiturs that he initially frames as action then admits are really just things he’s thinking about but that probably did occur at some point and therefore are still true.


Handler, as Snicket of course, talks about the nature of story structure, the importance of inspiring bewilderment, what details are and are not important to include, and the need to cause the reader to buy in to the side of the narrator. At one juncture he tells a story of a bad lesson given by an ornery writer which sounded remarkably familiar and which I paused in reading and laughed…. because I read that book this year.


Handler, as Snicket, talks about the evolution of writing advice as well, his ideas of the rules of writing changing in real time as he discusses Lemony Snicket moving about his fictional morning uncovering his potential imminent death and therefore murder.


He also very, very carefully discusses various ways to make eggs—a nod, I’d say, to the rule Lemony Snicket gives that you should only tell information relevant to the story. Handler, as Snicket, tells you many, many irrelevant things in the course of telling you the story, the story where he may presumably die at the end, without sharing other necessary information.


The true theme appears to be rules and breaking them.
Like cracking many eggs.


It is also a meditation on safety. The way in which safety can be so suddenly and irreversibly taken out from under us, “we have poisoned ourselves”.


We read to identify with bewilderment, explore our bewilderment, and we throw ourselves into imagination to find solutions to our bewilderment.


I encourage you to read this short, under 200 pages, meta narrative disguised writing advice. Slowly.


It’s in many ways life advice, too.

Self Awareness and Neil Gaiman

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The Neil Gaiman at the End of the Universe  by Arvind Ethan David is a half hour long audio play available as an Audible Original, –so not technically a book review, — narrated by Neil Gaiman and Jewel Staite, and it is absolutely delightful. It kicked my ass out of a rut I was in.

In it, Gaiman awakes on a space station to life support systems failing, and is able to repair it—discovering that he must therefore be an astronaut. He is isolated with only his AI computer and no memories.  He is able to determine from the AI that he is named Neil Gaiman and upon searching who that person is he discovers a prolific fantasy author from centuries before who has an apparent fascination with Gods and ‘seemingly unending comic book series’. Gaiman questions if he is this Gaiman somehow hundreds of years old or a contemporary person named for this Gaiman, to which the AI responds that it would rather not say.

Gaiman spends some time depressed about the apparent space mission he is on, which he has no memory of, discovering that he has had some brain damage resulting from the prior issues with life support systems.

Several weeks go by with the Neil Gaiman at the end of the universe in a depression, growing a beard and eating cheese out of a tube.

Then, after some time, he is compelled to start reading the books of this supposed Neil Gaiman fellow, not to try and determine who he is but to pass the time. (He is not a fan of Morpheus trapped in his bubble).

Gaiman, space-Gaiman, concludes that the point of Gaiman, the writer-Gaiman’s books, are the characters. Not the plots. After a few weeks of reading, emerging himself in characters, he finds himself no longer depressed or alone. He begins to repair the space station.

I won’t tell you act III.

Gaiman’s vocal performance as Gaiman is compelling; clearly he’s a man who reads aloud quite a lot but he’s a competent actor for which I don’t think he gets enough recognition. He also doesn’t flinch or cringe away from anything he might have to do in the service of telling a story. 

Which is perfect—as this is a story about self awareness and the importance of identity, self, and stories.

If you can find your way to it, it’s a great half hour to spend. Arvind Ethan David constructed a wonderful, meta story on the psychology of self.