Review: Le Medecin de Java, par Alexandre Dumas, père, aka L’ile de Feu

(English translation is below…)

Incroyablement bon !

Entre Dracula par Bram Stoker, Romeo et Juliette, et Zorba – mais c’est meilleur que tous les trois !!Et le Tome II était encore mieux que le premier. Des belles sacrifices par des mères, des belles vengeances, des morts atroces avec beauté, des exemples de la justice et de l’injustice extrêmes et clair mais qui donnent rire au même temps (par fois), et même de la nature !!!Ma sole critique c’était qu’il n’avait pas fait précisément correctement dans tous les détails de l’islam, mais c’était un des petits détails que sans doute ses lectures n’ont jamais remarqué et ça n’a pas du tout affecter la lecture. C’est juste que moi, parce que j’ai vécu en Turquie avec des amis, des voisins musulmans,  je connais un petit peu les détails qu’il a raté, mais ça n’affecté en rien au drame.   Et ce drame, c’était chouette !!  Vaut la peine de apprendre le français si on ne  leconnaît pas, si ce livre ne se trouve pas en anglais.

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Wow!!!Quick summary translation of my comments in French above, which I will correct later:  My only critique of this work is that Dumas really gets some of his character comments (dialogue) on Islam wrong, but he is not mean about it, it clearly shows that he simply was not Muslim (or did not live for years with Muslim friends and family).  I have noticed this in some of his other work, like his story La Boule de Niege (which I forgot that I had reviewed last year…),  (aka The Snow Ball, in English…) which was highly enjoyable, but a bit tooth grating in it’s treatment of Islam, (although not nearly as bad as the kinds of comments made by Jules Verne in some of his works, like the one where the old Pasha decides to go all the way around the Black Sea in order to avoid paying a new tariff for crossing the Bosporus…) that Dumas sometimes tries to work in material about that religion, but doesn’t always get it right.  But not in a way that makes is unreadable, fortunately.   This duology is absolutely worth downloading (these two volumes of his book, as with all of Dumas’ works, are available freely from various sources, at least in French, as they are all in the Public Domain, now) and even learning French, if necessary, in order to read. I had no idea how talented a writer of horror/fantasy Dumas could be, when he wrote such works, which is apparently not too often. This one, and it was a bit of a slow burn for me, from the start in-media-res of Tome I, was even better than Tome I. Tome II ratcheted up the heat and had me wishing, by the end, that there was more to read of this story. And it was very mult-faceted. It was sort of like Dumas’ answer to Bram Stoker, but with the drama of that story (Dracula), and of Romeo and Juliet, and of Zorba the Greek, all rolled into one, but better!

  I will get around to editing the html to link directly down to the English later, when I have more time, but for now, I can only apologize for taking so long to post this review here, and urge my non-Francophone readers to learn enough French to read this pair of books in the original, as it is well worth learning to read French in order to enjoy these two books in the language used by Dumas.

Shira

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