Monday 27 May 2019

Sofa Spotlight - A Life's Ambition, Alexandre Dumas

This is a fairly short read and it didn’t take me too long to get through it. The story follows the trials and tribulations of a young actor as he tries to make it in his chosen career and not the one that his father chose for him.

For a considerable part of the book the father thinks his son is in Paris actually employed as he wishes him to be, but we the reader know better, that he is actually tramping the roads around France with a band of actors.

What struck me is that quite often the hero’s plans don’t seem to work out and more often than not he is left cold and hungry. There is one particular scene where he and another aspiring actor are traipsing through deep snow in the middle of the night looking for shelter.

The only disappointment for me came at the end - Dumas clearly knew who the actor was and probably at the time most of his readers did too. I don’t and until I get round to looking it up I don’t know what happened to the actor after this book ends.

That aside I did really enjoy it and would recommend it. My favourite character was the actor’s father who had a tragic tale of his own to tell and is in my mind the true hero of this book.

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