Frankenstein

**** By Mary Shelley. Man. I dug this book.

Way back in the early 1800s, Shelley, her husband, and Lord Byron were all stuck in Switzerland, kept inside by inclement weather. They agreed they would each write a ghost story to pass the time. Shelley is the only one who did it. She published the book at 19 years of age. That book was Frankenstein.

I don’t know where all that crap about Frankenstein vs. his monster, the monster being some big green guy with screws coming out of his head, came from. The book is nothing like that. The book is so much better than that.

We start with narration by a foolhardy adventurer bound for the North Pole, whose ship picks up a nearly dead Frankenstein who’s been dog-sledding across the ice caps in pursuit of, you guessed it, his miscreant monster. Gradually we get Frankenstein’s side of the story, and then the monster’s. And so the tragedy unfolds, as the monster is jerked into life only to be abandoned by his creator. Frankenstein desires scientific magicianship; his monster wants only to be loved.

But I can’t tell you much more, or I’d spoil it. I highly recommend this book, as not only is it a beautiful book its own right, it has been the foundation for so much in 19th and 20th century literature and cinema, as it continues the creator/creation archetype dating as far back as or further than the Greeks’ Prometheus or the Garden of Eden. The prose is rather dense and verbose, but try to see your way past it to experience the story for itself.

Posted by Lisa on September 18, 2002 07:25 PM