In The Black Count: Glory Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss we will rediscover General Alex Dumas, the son of a black slave, who rose on the egalitarian tide of the French Revolution to command armies--and great love and respect--before a backlash of racist sentiment and an implacable foe, Napoleon, consigned him to prison and historical obscurity.
His essential character was preserved, however, by his son, Alexandre Dumas, in his adventure novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Reiss told the personal story behind his passion for biography to Interview Magazine:
"Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me. A lot of my interests came out of time I spent with him. The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them. The way lives intersect with history has always been my central obsession. And whenever I go on the road to hunt down one of these characters, I wear this very old London Fog raincoat from my great-uncle."Along with Dumas' story, Reiss tells readers about his own heroic efforts to restore him to common and historical memory. Over nearly a decade, he visited archives, libraries, and museums on several continents, and he even persuaded the town of Villers-Cotterets and the Alexandre Dumas Museum to allow him to crack the safe where Dumas' personal papers were stored.
What aspects of Dumas' character does Reiss emphasize? How does his personal character interact with the character of his times? And what can we learn about the power of memory from Dumas' story?
In her appreciation of The Black Count for the National Book Critics Circle finalists announcement, Marcela Valdes acknowledges the importance of biography as a genre:
"Reiss's account of Dumas's betrayal reminds us that racism means not only discrimination, but erasure. And that, at its finest, biography can be a kind of resurrection."We hope you will join the discussion of this Pulitzer Prize winning biography: Tuesday, July 2, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 18, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
