Kane X. Faucher's latest novel is a brilliant adaptation the classic Alexander Dumas tale of revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

I've always loved the original, and Faucher's book is a wonderful satire that cleaves to the original plot so carefully, I was continually impressed. I kept thinking, "There's no way he can maintain this!" But he did. So, I would encourage you to read the original story at some point if you already haven't, so this pleasure is not denied to you.

 

In Professor Montgomery Cristo: An Adjunct's Tale, Dantes is an up-and-coming academic. A PhD candidate with a glorious academic future ahead of him. But then he is wrongly accused of plagiarism (the academic equivalent of murder) and his hopes are dashed. Instead of prison, Dantes's is sent to a second-rate university, where he must toil as an adjunct professor, where he meets another sessional who will help him achieve his revenge on the jealous academics who ruined him.

 

All the bones of the original story are there, and then fleshed out with this wonderful satire of the unjust treatment of sessional teachers at modern universities. Sometimes called contract faculty, the life of a sessional can be tough. Particularly when you are on what is called a limited duties appointment, which is renewable term by term. This means sessional don't always know what they are teaching or even IF they are teaching next semester. The pay is low, and there are often no benefits. At many universities upwards of 40% of courses are taught by adjuncts.

 

All of these injustices – and many more -- are satirized by Faucher in this novel, and it is really worth your time. Now in interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that I have been, and am, a contract faculty member, and that Kane is a colleague, but this is a wholehearted recommendation. This book has the pacing of Dumas and the wicked sense of humor and genius of Faucher.

Did anyone else find anything odd on their shelves? I'm assuming it's due to the recent updates, but I just saw that Booklikes showed this book on my currently-reading shelf  ...

 

*hoping the rest of my shelves are okay, and in English*

i read this book many many years ago and remember loving it. i'm always nervous going back to a book that i enjoyed so much the first time. i wasn't necessarily disappointed (although here and there the writing wasn't as good as it could be) but i was surprised. i was surprised by the violence and the justification of the violence; i was surprised that it was a book in which 80% of the pages were about revenge. so i was disappointed in the main character, who we're supposed to cheer on as he makes a mess of the lives of people (and everyone related to them) who wronged him, who certainly deserved to be punished for what they did, but this was a bit extreme. it was also undeveloped in the sense that all of the characters were pretty much one dimensional. the 'bad' ones were bad to the core and had little to no redeeming qualities, and the 'good' ones were saints, as were their entire families. (there were some good people in the bad people's families.)for me it was interesting to read a book about vengefulness and people getting their due after reading the pelzer series, which is about serious intentional abuse (much worse than what happened to the protagonist in this book) and forgiveness. reading that, it felt really unrealistic to me that this man could, and should, forgive what happened to him. but if the alternative is the count of monte cristo then i stand corrected.what bothered me the most about this book, which is still a fun and entertaining read, is that at the end, the count starts to wonder if he went too far, if he really should have exacted the revenge that he did on everyone and their families. it seemed that we were finally going to get a morality tale, but, once he began to fully question, he realized that he was right, that everyone deserved what he facilitated to happen, and that he was even directed by g-d to bring punishment to these people.a dark, dark book about revenge and the vileness of people.