moni uddin

After months of picking up books only to put them back down, I finally committed and finished The Count of Monte Cristo.

And what a book it is.

It’s a slow burn initially, but once that cell door slams shut on Edmond Dantes at the Château d’If, the momentum is unstoppable.

Dantes becomes a symbol of resilience. He enters prison as a naive sailor who can’t read, and he exits fourteen years later as a multilingual genius, an economist, and eventually, the Count.

Strangely, as I was reading it, I was reminded of another favourite of mine, The Great Gatsby.

Jay Gatsby of West Egg, like Edmond, was a man who reinvented himself from nothing to win back a life he felt had been stolen from him.

Both men were consumed by a singular, blinding goal. For Dantes, it was revenge, to punish those who wronged him. For Gatsby, it was restoration, to recreate the past with Daisy.

They both acquired immense wealth, power, and status. They both built empires. But they built them on shaky foundations.

It’s a trap I know I’ve fallen into. We convince ourselves that life will truly begin only after we get the next thing. The new job. The validation. The car.

For me, it was my manuscript.

There was a time while writing the draft that I was consumed by the book. It was intoxicating. The flow state, the sense of purpose, the grind. Looking back, it felt like I was being productive, like Dantes learning in his cell. Now I can see how I was in a cell built from my own illusions.

What’s interesting, though, is where the Count and the Great diverge.

Gatsby lived inside the bubble of his dream. He died in that pool, still believing in the green light of both past and future.

Dantes, however, gets a second chance. He realises that the revenge he spent twenty years chasing didn’t bring him peace. It just left him empty. He only finds true freedom when he finally lets go of the Count and sails into the unknown.

Knowing this doesn’t always make it easier, of course.

I love The Great Gatsby because the ending feels honest. Most of us will probably pass on with the past and future still heavy on our minds.

But I’m certain there are some who, just in the nick of time, realise what Dantes did.

I’m certainly not there yet. With the noise of modern life, materialism, and social media, it’s easy to feel lost in the pursuit.

But I’d like to believe that when we find ourselves drifting in that pool, we have the courage to choose differently. To find the boat, leave the shallows, and sail into the open sea.