Per one of my last conversations with friend TNT, I'm embarking on my first reading of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. I've seen my husband star in Venice Theater's recent performance of it; I've watched the Boris Karloff movie from the 30's, the Kenneth Branagh movie from the 90's, Young Frankenstein, and even the puerilely oriented Monster Squad. I'd bypassed entirely, however, the experience of READING the dang thing.
A fact of which I'm weirdly glad: I think I would've been discouraged by the density of the language, when I was younger. Now, I just have to focus a little to keep my brain from checking out and skimming unseeing over the words. The phrasing is beautiful, actually. It has the same poetry you often get from literature of that time --thankfully, it's reminding me more the writing of Jane Eyre (my favorite book) than of Tale of Two Cities (of which I've read a page and a half).
For the book itself, I've read Walters's opening letter to his sister. Of this, I'm not sure I have much to say. I was caught by the quote: "...nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose --a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye," which I think I want to print and laminate for my classroom wall. Also, I was struck by the expositional quality of the thing. This is a man's letter to his sister, who one would assume knows the man's history of obsession, poetry attempts, and failure. Is it only for my relative inexperience with old writing that makes this remarkable? In modern storytelling, we would rag on the author for stiltedly feeding us this background via an unrealistic situation: the man's sister knows him, so he wouldn't be repeating his story to this extent. We'd call it weak writing. Yet when I think on what Shakespeare plays I know, the dialog is similarly stuffed with backstory. So perhaps it's a modern snobbery of ours to require subtler exposition.
Alright. Those are my initial thoughts on the initial chapter. Looking forward to more.
