Frankenstein

A few themes I especially enjoyed this time:

1. Imagination and the Arctic. On the first page, Walton enthuses about the imagined North polar utopia beyond the region of ice: "there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered"; "I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited"; "I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight." It's the perfect analogue of Victor's besetting ambition, and the first letter ends with Walton's remarks on the joys of sled travel, contrasting show more abruptly with the succeeding (indelible) image of the Monster driving his sled North. The polar regions are ready-made blank canvases for the imagination — c.f. Arthur Gordon Pym or The Thing, just for a start. Places of disorientation where compasses go haywire and horizons dissolve.

2. The young Shelley's sublimity. She's at pains here to play up Victor's annoying rationality, his anti-Romantic habit of analysis. This is in contrast to Elizabeth who is a pure poet. "While my companion [Elizabeth] contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things," Victor tells us, "I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine." Victor's tale is cautionary against the literal and rational. "Darkness had no effect upon my fancy" he reminisces — bad child, not frightened of bugaboos. Partly this is the fault of his permissive parents and liberal upbringing, his parents, "possessed by the very spirit of kindness and indulgence," allow his unnatural childhood proclivities free rein; partly it's just the way he is. If we concentrated more on "simple pleasures", even the history of the New World would be less sad: "If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Cæsar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed." Wow!

3. The horror. Amidst this novel's thematic smorgasbord, I think maybe we forget how disturbing it is. Shelley turns a couple of immaculate phrases in the service of the Weird — how about "who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?" Bone-chilling! The way the Alpine lightning portends the Monster's reappearence in Victor's life! Or the image of the Monster lifting the curtain of Frankenstein's bed and peering in soon after having been animated! Unforgettable images. At the same time, isn't it the Monster's ugliness that's really the root of all his problems? If he weren't so misshapen and repulsive, he'd presumably be pitied and have no trouble fitting in what with his native intelligence, empathy, fidelity and good-heartedness. It's always his disfigurement that wrecks things for him. So, and not to deny the smorgasbord, isn't this at heart a simple tragedy about narrow-mindedness, petty cruelty, mistrust of the deformed or Other? Shut up, of course it isn't just that!

I had completely forgotten about the Irish interlude. Like Dracula, this novel is front-loaded: the Monster's tale which occupies the central section is kinda slow and soppy. But it works. Easily one of my favorite novels and hard to think of a more influential one, or rather, one with a bigger influence beyond literature. show less

Uma experiência inigualável para quem nunca a experimentou: perturbadora, deprimente, mas também comovente e bonita, qualidades estas que têm resistido ao teste do tempo. É uma história que todos cremos conhecer e, na realidade, não conhecemos, a progenitora de inúmeros arquétipos encontrados na ficção científica e no gênero horror-gótico. Todos sabemos que Mary Shelley a escreveu em resposta a um desafio lançado por Lorde Byron durante umas férias na Suíça. O medo básico de que a tecnologia possa trazer o mal juntamente com o bem que traz é o tema central, assim como a mensagem de alerta contra brincar de interpretar o papel de Deus. A criatura é realmente inteligente e bem-falante, bastante diferente dos grunhidos show more inarticulados e meias frases ouvidas nos filmes extraídos do livro. Ela é no fundo uma criança tremendamente negligenciada, sem id nem superego, com força e inteligência para reagir em forma de contra-ataques. Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) é a mais famosa adaptação para o palco. show less

I love this book so much. I love how nature is described, how we can feel the monster's misery and desolation, as well as all the existential questions it poses.
I love how ambivalent one feels towards creator and creation: I like Victor's hunger for knowledge and at the same I emphatize with the monster. You don't bring life into this world to abandon it.
The monster's pleas also made me think of humans pleading to God(s) that left us to mend for ourselves. So incredibly sad yet so wonderful this book is.

"Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful."

Way creepier than the bolts-in-the-neck monster movies would lead you to believe (with all apologies to Boris Karloff), Frankenstein is really a study of the responsibilities of a creator/father to his creation/child and of the repercussions of failing in those responsibilities. The horror here stems from the obsessive interplay between Frankenstein and his "monster": each feels he must destroy the other. In the end, the book becomes both a sort of twisted Lazarus story and an inversion of Job, where here the creator suffers continued torments and losses at the hands of the created. Drags a touch in places, but in many ways a thrilling and compelling read.

The nesting narrative is very effective, and the story -- considering its time, and of course the lack of the archetype 'Frankenstein' in previous literature -- is perhaps surprisingly inventive. It rarely goes in the directions one might at first expect, even when familiar with the basic story beats. The intertextuality is also intriguing to me (thankfully this edition had elaborate endnotes for a lot of these references), and I'm particularly fascinated with the monster's self-identification with both Adam and Lucifer from "Paradise Lost". The novel is additionally quite short, making for a brisk read. That said, it also has a lot of meandering. Dr. Frankenstein's constant dread and anguish takes up a lot of pages (understandably), show more the monster's (admittedly great) soliloquies the same, as do small side-stories and travel descriptions (less understandably and less great), and this combine to making the plot feel a bit slow at times by my 2020 standards. All in all a novel I found to be good enough to be worth reading for its immeasurable impact on not only popular culture but the world in general, but probably a bit too dreary and dragged out for me to ever decide to revisit now that I've read it once.

- Loki show less

For most of us, Frankenstein begins in 1931: the storm, the tower, Boris Karloff’s stitched face. Reading Mary Shelley’s actual novel feels like having the pop-culture scaffolding ripped away. There’s no “It’s alive!” moment of triumph—only a spiral of privilege, guilt, and self-delusion told entirely through other people’s retellings.

The Frankenstein family is a study in blindness. They’re rich, virtuous on paper, and utterly insulated from the consequences of their own choices. Victor grows up in that vacuum of accountability—pampered by a father too detached to guide him—and predictably becomes the kind of man who mistakes ambition for destiny. When he creates life, it’s less divine spark than spoiled show more experimentation. And when things fall apart, he spends the rest of the book performing misery instead of fixing anything.

Shelley gives us no stable truth. Everything we know is filtered through Victor’s confession and Walton’s transcription of it. It’s gossip elevated to theology, which makes the story feel eerily modern—an early case study in unreliable narration. Was there ever a Creature at all, or is it the guilt made flesh inside Victor’s sleepless mind? Shelley never says, and that’s what makes it brilliant.

The Creature himself starts out as a kind of Elizabeth—gentle, observant, yearning to be loved—but isolation erodes that goodness until he becomes Victor’s mirror: proud, wounded, obsessed with being seen. They destroy each other not because one is evil and one is pure, but because they’re the same man in different skins.

The real shock of Frankenstein isn’t horror—it’s recognition. Behind every lightning bolt and graveyard myth is a story about privilege unchecked, empathy withheld, and the way power can narrate its own sins as tragedy. It’s messier, sadder, and far more human than the movie ever let on. show less

I love this book so much more than any of the movie adaptations I've ever seen (actually, for anyone seeking horror and thrill in a story, this may be a huge disappointment), but in comparison to other novels of that genre and time period it's far from being flawless.

I love the ideas in this story - the idea that one has to take responsibility for their creations, the idea that a being can be as gentle and good as a lamb, it will inevitably become a monster if it experiences nothing but rejection, the idea that just because something is scientifically possible doesn't mean that it should be done. Despite all the Romantic dressing up in this novel that makes it very clearly a product of its age, these premises are still modern and show more relevant.

My gripe is with the characters. I'm aware that this is probably the 21st century reader in me, but - gods almighty, that Victor is a pathetic, self-absorbed piece of selfpity, full of "woe is me", much more fixated on his own emotions and tragic history than on the danger he has released carelessly on the world and without much reflection about his own role in this disaster. All his relationships seem shallow and superficial, and the only woman with a meaningful role in the story gets classically fridged to give him the final push.

One day I'll have to read an adaptation from the wretch's point of view. His actions, reactions and justifications seem so much more interesting than Victor's. show less