Captain Pamphile: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798316930494)

Captain Pamphile is not a good man. He is a smuggler, an opportunist, a trader in whatever the market will bear - animals, contraband, and occasionally human beings - and he moves through the world with the serene confidence of someone who has never once doubted his right to be in it. He is also, in Dumas' hands, one of the funniest characters in nineteenth-century French fiction.

Captain Pamphile, first published in 1839 - before The Three Musketeers, before The Count of Monte Cristo - is one of Dumas' strangest and most underrated works: a frame narrative in which a group of Parisian friends entertain each other with tales of the captain's global escapades, from the Mediterranean to West Africa to the Americas, each story wilder and more improbable than the last. A monkey named Jacques provides a thread of inspired slapstick. Pirates, exotic animals, political conspiracies, and colonial grotesquerie accumulate around the captain like weather.

But beneath the comedy, Dumas - the grandson of an enslaved woman, the son of a general the empire discarded - is doing something precise and pointed. His portrait of European adventurism in Africa and the Americas is a satire with real teeth, and Captain Pamphile's breezy moral indifference is not presented for admiration but as a mirror held up to a civilization that preferred not to see itself clearly.

Hilarious, digressive, and sharper than it pretends to be, Captain Pamphile is Dumas before he became a monument - restless, irreverent, and impossible to put down.