Reviews for The Corsican Brothers

The average rating for The Corsican Brothers based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-24 00:00:00 Eric Dixon I was doing some minor research recently into people's ideas about twin telepathy, and was reminded of this book. I assumed I hadn't read it, so I hied me to Project Gutenberg to get myself a copy; I now think I had read it, but so very long ago that it was a matter of dimly recalling various plot elements as they happened rather than being able to predict what might happen next. Our narrator, who might as well be Dumas himself, is on a trip to Corsica. He takes lodgings at the home of Madame Savilia de Franchi and her son Lucien, and soon becomes involved with the doings of the family. He helps Lucien bring to a peaceful close a long-running vendetta between two families; this sequence has nothing to do with the main plot except, perhaps, to offer a different meaning to the title, because the feuding families are effectively twins of each other. Lucien explains to the narrator that his identical twin brother Louis lives in Paris, and that he can sense that Louis is going through some sort of emotional trough. For, you see, there's an extrasensory bond between the two young men -- not telepathy, precisely; not so much thought transference as emotion transference. They also have the habit of seeing ghostly harbingers at important moments. On return to Paris, the narrator makes the acquaintance of Louis and discovers that he is indeed going through emotional vicissitudes. He has fallen in love with the wife of a good friend who's away on business for a few months; he himself is acting with admirable restraint towards her, but now he's learned that the scoundrelly cad Chateau Renaud has been toying with her affections. The upshot is a duel between the two men, in which Louis loses his life. With astonishing speed Lucien, having been told by the spirit of his brother what has happened, arrives in Paris to demand a rematch . . . This is an entertaining enough novella, albeit a tad long for what it has to say; the rather tedious digression about the feuding families becomes more irking the more I think about it! I've read very little Dumas, and none at all aside from this slimmish volume since my teens; I really must do something to improve this situation . . .

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-04 00:00:00 Joseph Graziano I don't know why I love stories about dueling so much. I guess it has something to do with the way the two parties have to fight. It's not even a "fight", it's a mind game designed to break the weakest man as soon as possible. It's endurance what the duel is about, not which of them is better. Wonderful writing, but what could have I expected from the never aging Alexandre Dumas?