Category: Books

Swashbuckler Dumas Enters Pantheon of French Icons
PARIS (Reuters) – France buried Alexandre Dumas, the fast-writing, fast-living author of “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo,” in the crypt of the Pantheon in Paris Saturday, reuniting him with his friend Victor Hugo.
France’s best-known writer of romantic adventures, equally renowned for his own torrid love life, was reburied in the state’s official tomb of honor alongside his fellow novelist Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire and dozens of other French luminaries.
Dumas, who died in 1870, was transferred under a decree issued by President Jacques Chirac from a cemetery in the town of Villers-Cotterets north of Paris, where he was born in 1802.
“Today, Alexandre Dumas is no longer alone,” Chirac said at the reburial ceremony. “With him, our popular memory and our collective imagination enter the Pantheon.”
The coffin carrying Dumas’s remains was draped in a deep blue flag bearing the most famous line from his fictional band of fiery musketeers — “All for one and one for all.”
Dumas, grandson of a female Haitian slave, enchanted readers worldwide with more than 250 plays and novels of romance and adventure, churned out with an army of assistants. But his own life was perhaps wilder than those of his most fabled heroes.
He is said to have drawn much of his inspiration from the Caribbean escapades of his father, a mulatto general in Napoleon’s army who died when Dumas was four years old.
His best loved works — the adventures of the swashbuckling musketeers and the epic tale of love-smitten vengeance in “The Count of Monte Cristo” — were rushed out in just two years in the mid-1850s.
PRESIDENTIAL DECREE
In March, Chirac decreed that Dumas’s remains should be transferred to the Pantheon, the grave of more than 60 luminaries of arts, politics and science.
But his plan met resistance last year from intellectuals, feminists and historians.
They accused Dumas, renowned for extramarital affairs and rakish behavior, of sexism and questioned whether a writer who employed 60 helpers to produce commercially successful adventure stories deserved to lie beside the giants of French literature.
He earned a fortune from his work but spent it just as fast on friends and mistresses. He once fled to Brussels to escape creditors and only returned when a friend paid his bills.
One quotation attributed to Dumas epitomized his life:
“The chains of wedlock are so heavy it takes two people to carry them, sometimes three.”
Dumas is best known abroad for “The Three Musketeers,” which tells the adventures of four heroes living during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.
He was widely credited with reviving the French romantic novel through serialization and had a huge story-telling talent that blended fiction and fact until they were indistinguishable.
Self-educated, he worked in his hometown as a clerk and left for Paris at a young age. He briefly stopped writing to join the revolution of July 1830, traveled to Russia, and then to Italy at the invitation of the insurgent Giuseppe Garibaldi.
One of the last stops on his three-day, posthumous journey to Paris was the Chateau de Monte Cristo, the castle he had built in honor of the hero of his novel.
As he made his way to the Pantheon, French Senate President Christian Poncelet quoted a comment Victor Hugo once made after Dumas paid him a visit during a period of exile on the island of Guernsey: “I will return the visit at his grave.

Cobain’s ‘Journals’ Hits Bookstores
NEW YORK (AP) – A collection of Kurt Cobain’s journal entries was released Monday, more than eight years after the Nirvana singer’s death.
“Journals” is a collection of photocopies of the actual journals, not transcribed text. They include Cobain’s doodles, practice letters he wrote, a quiz he made up for driver’s education, comic strips he drew, a love letter to wife Courtney Love and even a recipe for shrimp salad.
It also features a discussion of an album he wanted to call “I Hate Myself and I Want To Die,” which eventually was released as “In Utero.”
Aside from the letter, there are only passing mentions to Love, who gained fame after Cobain’s death as lead singer of Hole and as an actress in such films as “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man on the Moon.”
With the release of “Nevermind” in 1991, Nirvana led a wave of Seattle artists who dominated music in the early 1990s. Cobain committed suicide on April 5, 1994, at 27.

Cobain contemplates aging, selling out, dying in ‘Journals’
In between musings on drugs and suicide, Kurt Cobain recorded his fear that he and his groundbreaking grunge band, Nirvana, would become aging rock stars reduced to playing reunion concerts at amusement parks.
“Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend,” Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994, wrote in a never-released letter to fans.
That 1992 letter is included in Journals, a collection of disjointed diary entries, letters and drawings taken from Cobain’s notebooks, to be published by Riverhead Books on Nov. 4.
Journals excerpts appear in the new issue of Newsweek. Riverhead reportedly paid Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, $4 million for publishing rights.
“It’s a cautionary tale of addiction,” Newsweek senior editor Jeff Giles says. “We see this arc of him going from a young guy desperate to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band to a famous singer desperate to get out of the limelight.”
Inside Cobain’s mind:
* On himself: “I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs (but my body and mind won’t allow me to take them). I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. … I like to feel guilty for being a white, American male.”
* On fame: “I didn’t want all this attention, but I’m not freaked out. It’s an entertaining thought to watch a rock figure … mentally self-destruct. But I’m sorry, friends. I’ll have to decline. Maybe Crispin Glover should join the band.”
* On drugs: “It might be time for the Betty Ford clinic or the Richard Nixon library to save me from abusing my anemic, rodent-like body any longer. … I decided to use heroin on a daily basis because of an ongoing stomach ailment that I had been suffering from for the past five years. (After rehab) I instantly regained that familiar burning nausea and decided to either kill myself or stop the pain. I bought a gun but chose drugs instead.”

‘Red Rabbit’ burrows into Cold War comfort
Jack Ryan returns in “Red Rabbit.”

Harry Potter 5 Delayed
Author J.K. Rowling was supposed to deliver HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX soon so that it could be published in July. Now, however, POTTER publisher Scholastic has announced that it will publish the book sometime “before June 2003.”