The Queen’s Necklace by Alexander Dumas TIME TRAVEL

 The Queen’s Necklace by Alexander Dumas


TIME TRAVEL

Amusement, Wisdom and Deceit

 

I was reading the other day in The Economist about The Queen’s Necklace and I was flabbergasted:

-          What is this teenager, rather silly Dumas story doing here?!

-          After all, the Economist is a serious, posh news magazine!

-          It turns out, the plot is the same, but the interpretation is a new one.

-          And the paper decided to have a review of the same old story, told by a new author

I am not sure if a spoiler alert is in order here…I am interested to travel in time, with the help of this book, which might bring memories of my Ice Age, therefore I am not sure if this could be of any interest for you, in search of something on the Necklace and stumbling upon…Requiem For A Dream- a weird but excellent film, well everyone is either a junkie, alcoholic or sex addict…if I remember well…people go through the screen in a trance…pretty much like my walk through my fuzzy,  foggy recollection of this Dumas novel.

It is good to write, even if just for the fun of it, or for some forgettable notes…like this one here. It helps the mind work, and when you write about a book which you have read ages ago, the effect may be reinvigorating, you may even end up traveling in time.

-          In a Harvard experiment made by professor Ellen Langer, some old boys have turned back the clock

-          What on earth does this mean?

-          Well, for details, you either google it, or go to one my blogs www.realini.blogspot.ro

-          But the basic idea is that you create the proper mindset

-          You can TRAVEL IN TIME

Which is what I expect at the end of this note, to find myself with a full head of curly hair, good vision and no glasses, and calling for my mother…for I am scared to see that I have become…ten years old.

No kidding- in the Langer test, at the end of the experiment people got younger, and one of the elements was that in the house where the research took place, the reading material was twenty years old, priming the participants, together with other factors, to immerse in the period when they were twenty years younger.

So this is what it is, an experiment I am doing with myself, and at this stage I feel I am already 33…so it is working.

As for the story itself, it does have some interesting elements, although who am I talking to…by this time nobody is reading this fucked up note anymore, and if I journey trough time again, I would be pretty confused myself making head or tail:

-          What is this crazy stuff

-          Where is Dumas?

-          And has he got to do with Requiem for a Dream?

-          Or time travel?

-          Are you nuts?

Well the personages in the Necklace were pretty naïve themselves – there is a cardinal Rohan who is pretty funny with his fall for a comedy act:

-          He is told that the queen herself is interested in him

-          The cardinal goes something like…

-          Uuuuhh –

-          I got the moves like Jagger

-          And pays through his nose

-          For diamonds, kerfuffle, shindig and all

They even bring up a woman of questionable reputation to dress up like the queen. There is even a guy- forgot his name- was it Cagliostro?- who pretended to be a kind of psychic and speaking of time travel, to have been somewhere in Egypt, thousands of years ago, and to have killed someone.

There is at least a movie based on this and I remember laughing through it, though it was one of the plots where you are supposed to be mortified and yet you laugh your pants off.

In conclusion, this is a book for teenagers, but I seriously doubt that many teenagers of the present and future will engage in it, or read this note for advice on the matter. Wait…there is chance… in a billion.

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