I am about a hundred pages into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I have never read before.
I have, of course, seen the old Universal movie with Boris Karloff as the Monster, and I think I saw the 1990s Kenneth Branagh version as well. While I knew that the films strayed from the plot and story of the novel, I guess I was not aware of just how much they did so.
My main impression so far is that Victor Frankenstein is an insufferable prick.
He obsesses for months (year?) over the method of creating life and then the second he does create it, he immediately decides it is a monster and runs away. He then falls into a nervous breakdown and requires his friend Clerval to spend months of his ow life nursing him back to health. When Victor finally remembers return home—only upon the news of the murder of his brother—he is so consumed by his own anguish that he can barely spare time to think of anyone else. When his family’s ward Justine is wrongly convicted of the murder, Victor insists that his torment is worse than hers.
Now he has wandered off up a nearly mountain to ruminate upon the heavy burden of his own feelings and presumably to commune with the sublime.
🙄
While I can’t stand Victor, I really like the book so far. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure is intriguing. Shelly did not need to tell the story in this manner and I wonder if it is to some purpose.
And while I am surely not the first to suggest it, I feel like this book ought to be required reading for anyone building technology. Every “Did you really think this through?” question that dogs are current era of tech run amok is laid out here.
I think it is also a book about being a parent.