Frankenstein

Rating:
Summary: More relevant than ever
Review: Written almost two centuries ago, Shelley's science-fiction/horror novel "Frankenstein" retains its powerful messages and questions to this very day.

A devoted scientist, Victor Frankenstein, attempts to return to life a body he has constructed from various human parts. He succeeds, only to realize the hideousness of his creation, and subsequently flee.

Confused but sympathetic, Frankenstein's monster finds himself shunned by humans. Eventually, a series of tragedies turns him against humanity, and he turns his thoughts to seeking revenge on his creator for not providing him with either protection or companionship. Meanwhile, Frankenstein is determined to protect himself and his family, while removing his mistake from the world. The two spend the latter portion of the novel in a drawn-out duel, spiralling towards misery for both of them.

Shelley's work raises profound questions about the limits of science, its requirements for wisdom as well as intelligence, the responsibilities of parents, and the nature of revenge - quite an accomplishment for a novel of only 250 pgs. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: forget the movies....
Review: ....and read this, one of the all-time greats, both in its style and its story.

Young Victor Frankenstein regards himself as an alchemist, a searcher after the secrets of life. Like many idealists, he is willing to go to great lengths to realize his dream.

Unfortunately, and again like many idealists, he forgets that, being human, he too has a dark side, and unless one comes to terms with it, it's liable to show up right in one's face one day...

Some of the most moving passages herein come from the "monster," who is poignantly eloquent about how he feels about being lonely and homeless and abandoned by his creator. Even so, Victor will not hear him, and therein begins the tragedy--for what we will not hear will raise its voice until we're forced to.

"You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale; one that may direct you if you succeed in your understanding, and console you in case of failure." -- V. Frankenstein

Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Moral and Reaching Deep
Review: There is no quantifying the impact of Frankenstein. Whatever it is about, it commands a heavy reaction about loss, tragedy, love, innocence, true Christianity, ethics and personhood.
Cloning in this scientific age might not be as challenged as Shelley's world was. On one hand, we have a beast, sans a mother's womb to birth from, on the other, we have a wretched society of bigotry and anger... The monster's ardent natural morality mixed with ID-like needs and a child's tenderness tears at the reader. Is he real? Is he, despite his innocence, like an unborn baby, free to be aborted? Or, is he validly human, as human as you or I, or like that fetus moments after it leaves the womb, kind and gentle, yet ignorant?
A great catapult toward discussion and analysis, or just a plain old good read, but not without impact.
I fully recommend this book.
Anthony Trendl

Rating:
Summary: Excellant craftmanship but...
Review: I wonder whether Shelley intended the pallid ineffectual women of Frankenstein to be irony? Showing how men expect women to be mirrors of their narcaccistic selves. Point made, but I personally am not amused. However, this book is wonderful in providing an in-depth analysis of Shelley's own emotions. She had an illigetimate marriage and illigetimate children while living in an unforgiving society. When going out in public she felt ostrasized, like a monster perhaps. Aha! The idea for Frankenstein was born out of her own isolation. Victor repulses me with his weak excuses and selfishness when it came down to saving Justine. Throughout the entire novel there is an obsession with the class system and beauty. The characters that aren't wealthy and of a privileged birth are less worthy as human beings. Elizabeth was adopted because of her beauty alone; the other peasant children were ignored. I suppose this book reflected the concerns of the nineteenth century almost perfectly

Rating:
Summary: Always a classic
Review: First, don't buy this if you expect to read a scary horror story. It's also not exactly science fiction since the details of the monster's creation are left out..

However, this book is still clearly a classic. It's amazing to think it was written 200 years ago by a 19-year-old woman. The themes are as fresh today as they must have been novel when the book was written.

The primary theme, in my opinion, is whether the monster is to be considered a human. This topic is seen in the debate over cloning. Secondly, Shelley puts forth the notion that the monster is inherently kind & caring but is driven to evil by society's obsession with outward appearance.

I agree with other reviewers who say that information is left out. I was puzzled as to how the monster learned to speak so well in such a short amount of time. The issues of food & clothing are also in question. However, looking at the larger themes involved, these details are minimal and do not detract from the story..

Rating:
Summary: Step Back and Take a Good Look...
Review:         I ask if Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is really all its cracked up to be. For generations, this book has been rated as one of the greatest horror stories of all time. I can understand at the time this was written it horrified many people, but did it really stand the test of time?
        My main problem with the book was the lack of information. So many things were left out, especially the details on how The Creature was actually created. The general writing style that Mary Shelley used when writing this book is very weak, and isnt supported enough by actual fact to make it beleivable. It seems that on many occasions, she avoids getting into details about things she knows nothing about, and just assumes the reader will accept this. I needed more than just excuses to keep me wanting to read on.
        This isnt my only complaint, we reach other voids as well. When The Creature is drifting around for months on end, he suspicously, and coincidentally, finds cloaths, food, and fire out of nowhere. These coincidences not only distract, but confuse the reader at times. It sometimes provokes the idea that maybe Mary Shelley herself doesnt know what to do, which ultimatelly supports my argument on her weak writing style.
        I was gravely dissapointed in this book after I finished it, and was left wanting much, much more out of it. It could have been much better. It could have been a satire on human life, or given a much deeper question on what is it to be human, or to be God, or what it means to be given life, or a soul. These were the questions I was asking throughout my read, and these are the questions that were never answered sufficiently enough.
        I read this book to get a taste of the classics, and what a good horror story might be like...if you want to read a horror classic, read The Exorcist, or Bram Stoker's Dracula...I always liked Lagosi more than Karloff anyways.

Rating:
Summary: Mediocre.
Review: Another school assignment. I can't see why they bother. "Frankenstein" is a passable book: it has a plot; it has characters which aren't quite engaging as a whole, but some of them manage well enough. The thing is, there isn't much to find in this novel besides story. However, there's some. The real horror is not the monster, but the failings of humankind, and to a lesser extent the price science exacts upon nature, and ultimately the price nature exacts upon the idiots who went too far.

Victor Frankenstein is such an idiot. A little too passionate (a little too like Mary Shelley's husband Percy Bysshe Shelley), he isolates himself from the people that love him, obsesses over chemistry and natural philosophy, and creates a monster from scraps of bodies recovered from charnel houses. Victor's philophobic. He ends up, one way or another, killing those that love him; because he cannot give his own creation the love and kindness it needs. Here is where Mary Shelley succeeds: she makes it clear all the while that he is a human; and because the story is narrated by him you get some sort of a glimpse into the way he was thinking. And he didn't think too differently from the average person you might meet on the street. That's scary.

However, the characters are so dull that I didn't care when they were killed. Shelley does things so amazingly lame: oh no! he/she's dead, Victor laments, Victor doesn't get sense knocked into him. Count the deaths. Then look over what you've read. You will realize you saw each of them coming. And not just because you've heard a lot about this book in the first place.

Yes, there's a lot of the author in here. And there's even some of her husband, the infamous Percy. The appearance of the word "endeavor" every other page was, I think, part of his attempt to make "Frankenstein" more worthy of the Romantics of the time. It was written by his 19 year old wife, whose vocabulary was apparently not so extensive as his own, so he looked on it as his duty to poke around with the manuscript. Oh, if only he'd buggered off!

Teachers stumbling upon this review: please, please, make your students read stuff like "Paradise Lost" (a building block of Mary Shelley's and mentioned in the novel) by John Milton, much more interesting stuff. Slap before them a summary of this novel. They'll get it. Allow them to read this thing on their own time if ever they so wish. "Frankenstein" was praised by Sir Walter Scott: how "deep" can it be?

Rating:
Summary: Very over-rated book.
Review: I watched the movie with Helena Boham Carter first, and I thought it was a wonderful movie, so I decided to read the book. The book was a terrible book. I couldn't relate to any of the characters, except the creation. Everyone, except the creation, was so perfect! Elizabeth was Barbie incarnate! She was smart, talented, kind, loving, honest, loyal, beautiful (looked just like Barbie). Victor was the same, except he made something that wasn't beautiful. So an ugly thing crashes Victor's perfect world. Boo-hoo-hoo. The only thing that made sense in the story was the creation. The way he explained how he was so lonely, how if Victor made something, why would he want to make it suffer so. I felt so bad for the creation. Victor made absolutely no sense in why he wouldn't make a companion for the creation. He said something about evil, and how there would be more killing, but the creation explained to him, more than once, why he did what he did (the little boy, the friend, etc.) And he even warned Victor that there would be more destruction unless he had a companion. The ending was good, how the captain understood the monster. I felt contempt for the characters in the book. The creation was the only character who had any depth. Victor and Elizabeth and everyone else was so involved with their perfect, beautiful world that it was dumb. They were so flat, one dimensional characters. I know that Shelley wanted us to understand the monster, which I did (thus the 2 stars), but the rest of the characters were mindless. Real life isn't like Victor's world. Real life is like the Creation's world. Searching for something, searching for a part of you, searching for the meaning of why we were put on this earth because life is vicious and cruel. I would recommend reading this book only for the sake of the character of the Creation. It was such a small book, but I got so annoyed by the dumbo characters.

Rating:
Summary: Depth, depth, depth
Review: If you want to read Frankenstein as a classic horror story, you are missing Everything! Outwardly, especially due to the bastardization of the enigmatic and prophetic novel by cinema and mass media, people look at Frankenstein as a novel about a monster. End of story. But Shelley meant so very much more. Frankenstein is a desperate, angry, pleading outcry against industrialization and the destruction of humanity by moderization and advancement. The creature was Shelley's way of saying "where are we going?" "what have we done to man when science takes precedence over forthought?" This is also a new persceptive of man as the creation of God and banishment of Adam. Instead, in Shelley's world, man has grabbed at the reigns and assummed the role as creator and, as God, is horrified at his creation. Frankenstein acts without thought, then hastily casts off his creation as an abomination. And, the creature, like man's pursuit of divinty, ravenously pursues his creator. Shelley asks if this is the relationship of man and God. Have we been rejected? Cast aside as a hideous mistake? Are we relentlessly pursuing a creator that sees us as an abomination? If you want to peer into Shelley's philosophical soul, read Frankenstein. Write in the margins. Puzzle over the questions. Ask yourself where you stand after you see the vision of Shelley. Of course, if you want a monster on a rampage, rent the movie. The black and white versions the best.

Rating:
Summary: Will the Real Frankenstein Please Stand Up?
Review: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" has the odd honour of having an unnamed monster which gets confused with the protagonist (afterall everyone calls the monster FRANKENSTEIN when he is unnamed), but the merging of identities and names is at the heart of this classic. Questions about creation, the limits of human knowledge and actions are explored, as well as what is human and what is not. Shelley's protagonist Frankenstein slowly reveals the harsh and cruel side of himself as the novel progresses, while the monster he creates takes on more human traits expressed in his guilt at the murder of the child, and his desire for a companion to ease his lonely days. At the end of the novel, it appears that the roles have reversed. Frankenstein's personality takes on a more "monstrous" aspect while the monster gradually attains the readers' sympathy. The monster and the human therefore switch positions and we have to question and relook what we define as "human" or otherwise. The story on intertwined fates and dependence reaches a tragic end as the release for both monster and creator is possible only through death.