La versione cinematografica che trovo più prossima al romanzo della Shelley è questa, del 1994: regia di Kenneth Branagh, Robert De Niro interpreta la mostruosa creatura. So this guy goes on and on in these letters to his sister about how he wishes on every star that he could find a BFF at sea. After a few ( too many) letters, they pull a half-frozen Frankensicle out of the water. This book is sort of the antidote to those cliche inspirational office posters about ambition everyone had in the 90s, because here we find ambition to drip into arrogance and basically create calamity. Framed from the perspective of Cpt. Walton as he attempts to reach the North Pole—and fails—we hear the story of another man who’s blinded by his own ambition until it is too late. Doctor Victor Frankenstein’s story is a chilling fall-from-grace story, beginning with a sweet adolescence that slowly turns to the grotesque along a path of bloodied corpses of innocent people to chronicle his own loss of innocence. The spark to this is the early death of his mother, coupled with his reading of scientific books at university (self-education through books is mirrored as well through his monster), amalgamating into an idea with the best intentions to ‘ renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.’ We all know the maxim that good intentions are the paving stones to Hell, however. Pero sería Mary Shelley quien al final terminaría ganando y todo surge a partir de un extraño y profético sueño que tuvo en ese castillo, luego de leer entre todos distintos cuentos de los más afamados escritores alemanes, siendo E.T.A. Hoffmann el referente más importante.

Five: No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. As gorgeous as the prose is, I thought it a crime not to include at least one quote. An upper-crust guy sails off to the Arctic to make discoveries, and to pass the time he writes to his sister. Supposedly, he's been sailing around on whaling ships for several years. And he's been proven an invaluable resource by other captains. Integrating this element opens up many ethical implications regarding who the real monster is, leading to La escena nos lleva directamente al momento en el que Víctor Frankenstein, en esa tormentosa noche demencial, casi de la misma manera que en el cuento “El sueño” que la autora escribiera dos años antes, exclama que si criatura está viva: "Era ya la una de la noche. Una lluvia lúgubre golpeaba los cristales y la vela estaba a punto de apagarse cuando, iluminado por el resplandor de la luz casi consumida, vi que el ojo amarillento y mortecino de la criatura se abría; respiró con dificultad y agitó sus miembros con un movimiento convulso."

Customer reviews

Indeed, the real monster of this novel is Victor Frankenstein, and not his monstrous creation. The creature is a monster on the outside but Victor is on the inside, which is a form much worse. By abandoning the creature he has taught him to become what his appearance is. The first human experience he receives is rejection based upon his physicality. His own creator recoils in disgust from him. He cannot be blamed for his actions if all he has been taught is negative emotion, he will only respond in one way. He is innocent and childlike but also a savage brute. These are two things that should never be put together. Woe to Victor Frankenstein’s family.

Mary quotes her beloved Percy Bysshe Shelley, unattributively, when Dr Frankenstein first spots his creature up on the Mer de Glace. She uses the final two stanzas from ‘Mutability’. For me though it's the beautiful first stanza that better expresses the ferocious intensity of Mary and her circle of friends and lovers, surrounded as they all seemed to be by imminent, premature death: This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind.Due to the efforts of a few Kool-ade drinking trolls who have gotten their big girl/big boy panties in a wad over an almost 200 year old book and can't comment nicely on my review, I am suspending all future comments. Sometimes literature stands for little. The Tambora volcano eruption in 1815 completely changed Europe's climate, particularly between 1816 and 1817. It led to almost glacial periods in the Alps. Around this time, friends Shelley and Byron traveled around Switzerland on vacation. The lousy weather obliges them to often remain secluded in their chalet, with, like a favorite pastime, to invent extraordinary stories. During one of these evenings, it would be born, from the imagination of Mary Shelley, the character of Frankenstein and his creature - feeding on romantic, gothic, and fantastic literature, with the scientific spirit in vogue at the time of the early 19th century. It remained to polish the plot with the help of Percy Shelley. He then relayed by cinema and the high physics of Boris Karloff. And this is how a myth is born! Mad scientists are certainly as old as time, although I can´t choose if a crazy priest vivisecting human sacrifices is cooler than a Star Wars/Trek antagonist letting robots and AI do all the dirty work. However, it often seems as if the creature, monster, or übermensch created was the truly terrible thing and not the people sponsoring this stuff. By contrasting this with the somewhat noble monster Shelley gives a What remains today of good literary work? The plot is very moralizing. Like Prometheus, can a man play the Demiurge? The good feelings, the good, and the bad repeated to excess weigh down the story. Too many lengths on existential themes end up harming the action. From my point of view, this romanticism no longer passes for today's reader. Mary Shelley takes the reader on a journey through St Petersburg, to the beautiful Swiss Alps, to the desolate waste of the Arctic Circle, in a story that has sent a chill down the spines of generations.