August 20, 2006
Downright Peculiar
This blog is rapidly becoming about nothing but books and quotes about them. From Terrence Rafferty's review of a new translation of The Three Musketeers, in today's Times book review:
Richard Pevear’s brisk, agile new translation succeeds, I think, because it does justice to the pure nuttiness of Dumas’s writing: the nonindustrial, nonformulaic, downright peculiar qualities that make a work of popular fiction memorable. ... As if to emphasize their obliviousness, Dumas gives them an entirely pointless set piece of derring-do: they occupy an abandoned bastion for a quiet conference, over lunch, on strategies to defeat Milady, and calmly finish their meal before finishing off the attackers who have been trying to recapture their refuge. Sang doesn’t get more froid than that.
Affection for The Three Musketeers seems to be distributed in a very odd fashion-- people whose literary taste I otherwise respect utterly or largely share sometimes hate it (and its endless sequels). People who otherwise like dross dreck frequently like it. My working hypothesis is that this is because reading Dumas at a fairly young age is formative, and people who like good books now frequently read lots of bad ones when they were 5 or 10 or 15. (I am a case in chief.)
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