First Among Monsters, 22 May 2003

By	Peter Reeve (Woodland Hills, CA USA) - See all my reviews

The first thing to say is that it is not the story you know from the Hollywood versions. The scientist is called Frankenstein and he created a man; the similarity ends there. All the details are different. The novel is a strange, obsessive tale, complex in structure and rich in psychological symbolism. The real, underlying themes are incest, sibling rivalry and the self-destructive power of guilt. I will refrain from further comment on the story itself, because you are better coming to it fresh and letting it unfold.

The author's style is always competent, often elegent, but never sublime. She is not the poet of the family. We are offered lengthy word-portraits of Alpine landscapes that are clearly intended to transport the reader but in fact leave you prosaicly in place.

Not in the first rank of literature therefore, but so strikingly imaginative and replete with such memorable imagery that it is still worth reading.

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Had I a right to inflict this curse upon generations?, 9 Sep 2005

By	Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews

The 'unhallowed arts' of Frankenstein produce a 'filthy mass that moved and talked', but it was nevertheless a human being with normal human aspirations: 'Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good, misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.'

But, he is a 'painted bird': 'Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned, and kicked, and trampled on.'
His reaction is: 'If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.'

Mary Shelley's vision of mankind is far from rosy: 'I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty.' 'A man was considered, except in very rare circumstances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few.' 'Was man yet so vicious and base? I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow...'
But, 'how strange is that clinging love we have of life, even in the excess of misery'.

Her world is one of resentment, racism and jealousy: 'religion and wealth had been the cause of his condemnation'.

Frankenstein is the scion of the evil principle in man, the invention of a man-scientist and a painted bird, who is not accepted by the rest of the human race. His reaction is revenge.

This is a great text by an 18 year old.
As Oscar Wilde said in 'The Critic as Artist': ' For when a work is finished it has as it were, an independent life of it own, and may deliver a message far other than that which was put into its lips.'
Some texts become even more important and luminous with time, as this masterpiece.

A must read.

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