Letter: Response to Illiterate Book Review

A friendly little "cat fight." Photo: Flickr Creative Commons

Dear Scoop,

Okay, woah-eee-woah-woah…sound of tires screeching…sound of erroneous game show buzzer… Really, Mr. Swayz? The pretence for your review of The Count of Monte Cristo involves some sort of clichéd, wayward Ontarian girlfriend, so unreceptive to foot odour that she starts sleeping around as soon as she arrives in Golden? I have lived in the mountains for most of my adult life and I think portraying the winter population as an accumulation of humanist scholars vying for the attention of a handful of tarts is a gross misrepresentation. Is this really how you want to depict and affront the female gender in a town that has about ninety two percent more single dudes than dudettes? Not a particularly friendly attitude toward potential demographic changers is it?

Moreover, your scenario is missing a pretty vital part of the formula – you left out the ceaseless nights of beer pong and endless video game sessions that would send, even Monte Cristo’s gal, running for the nearest ski patroller.

And Monte Cristo? Meh… that character was loosely based on one of the Bonapartes –you know, the tyrannical leaders of France through the 19th century (he is Napoleon the ‘whatever’s cousin or nephew or something) – are we really supposed to feel bad for some autocrat who gets screwed over by another despot?

I will let you off the gender inequity hook if you review Graeme Fife’s Angel of the Assassination. I haven’t read the novel myself, but I know that it is based on Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. She stabbed him in the bathtub with a kitchen knife in an effort to thwart the Jacobins “reign of terror” following the French Revolution… how is that for vengeance?

From ‘Baby’ Houseman