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Kenneth Oppel & Mary Shelley
Aug. 30th, 2011 08:10 pmToday's post is honor of Mary Shelley's birthday and Kenneth Oppel's new series This Dark Endeavor about the adolescence of Victor Frankenstein. I rather enjoyed the first book, which shows familiarity with Mary Shelley's life and work. But I'm reserving judgement until I see how things play out:
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Letter-Blocks-The-BN-Parents-and/This-Dark-Endeavor-Mary-Shelley-s-Frankenstein-re-imagined/ba-p/1146062
Mary Shelley remains an enigma to me, but I did pick up on one interesting criticism I hadn't hit before and I tucked it into the review for further meditation:
One very creepy scene in Oppel’s book deals with the restoration of an ancient book whose pages have become fused together. Oppel’s Victor narrates, “And for a moment the book seemed not a book at all but a living body, and instead of paper, I glimpsed pulsing viscera and blood and organs. I blinked again, not trusting my vision. But --- and this was most strange and repulsive --- the book seemed to emanate the smell of a slaughterhouse, of entrails and offal."
This curious scene gives life, not only to the later monster --- which has not yet made an appearance by the end of Oppel’s book --- but to one of the interesting critical interpretations of Mary Shelley’s book. The sense that the monster (and it’s important to note that in Mary Shelley’s work the monster remains unnamed; it is only later monsters that have taken on the name of their creator: Frankenstein) is not just constructed of bits and pieces of human bodies, but bits and pieces of philosophy: a sort of living word. The monster’s strange education --- like Shelley’s own --- is cobbled together from his overhearing the conversations of others. What is most moving about Frankenstein is the eloquent voice Mary Shelley ultimately gives the monster. The monster comes across as more sympathetic, more human, than its creator, despite the acts of vengeance it enacts upon its creator and his family.
That palimpsest* incarnate... I don't know whether that makes it creepier or more wonderful or both.
* a page that has been scraped so it can be used, again.
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Letter-Blocks-The-BN-Parents-and/This-Dark-Endeavor-Mary-Shelley-s-Frankenstein-re-imagined/ba-p/1146062
Mary Shelley remains an enigma to me, but I did pick up on one interesting criticism I hadn't hit before and I tucked it into the review for further meditation:
One very creepy scene in Oppel’s book deals with the restoration of an ancient book whose pages have become fused together. Oppel’s Victor narrates, “And for a moment the book seemed not a book at all but a living body, and instead of paper, I glimpsed pulsing viscera and blood and organs. I blinked again, not trusting my vision. But --- and this was most strange and repulsive --- the book seemed to emanate the smell of a slaughterhouse, of entrails and offal."
This curious scene gives life, not only to the later monster --- which has not yet made an appearance by the end of Oppel’s book --- but to one of the interesting critical interpretations of Mary Shelley’s book. The sense that the monster (and it’s important to note that in Mary Shelley’s work the monster remains unnamed; it is only later monsters that have taken on the name of their creator: Frankenstein) is not just constructed of bits and pieces of human bodies, but bits and pieces of philosophy: a sort of living word. The monster’s strange education --- like Shelley’s own --- is cobbled together from his overhearing the conversations of others. What is most moving about Frankenstein is the eloquent voice Mary Shelley ultimately gives the monster. The monster comes across as more sympathetic, more human, than its creator, despite the acts of vengeance it enacts upon its creator and his family.
That palimpsest* incarnate... I don't know whether that makes it creepier or more wonderful or both.
* a page that has been scraped so it can be used, again.
