Written: January 19, 2020.
So it is now 2019. 2018 has passed away. Time for a new set of books to read this year.
Before I get into my book review for Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, let me just say a few things.
I've been using this website called Goodreads since last year. It's basically a site where you could find books, read their synopses, and read some reviews from other people about it. It's fun, it's informative, it's good. If you wanna keep track of the books you've read in your life, and if you also want to let other people know about it, then this website will do that for you. You just look up the book, and click the button below the cover art. It's that easy.
Plus, every year, you could challenge yourself on how many books you want to finish within the year. Goodreads could keep you on track of what you've read.
Anyway, on to the book review.
I know that this book has been around for like a century already, and I know that there are a lot of reviews about this book out there already. But you know, everybody's welcome to do their own thing. If I wanna do a review on this book, then I'm free to do that, just as equally as you can, too.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a book I didn't really expect to finish. I bought this book together with Dracula by Bram Stoker. I read Dracula first, and discovered that the book was NOT my cup of tea.
The way it(Dracula) was written, the long dialogues of just this one character named Van Helsing really tipped me off. It was a really hard book to burn through, and for that, I didn't finish it. Not only because of the length of the book, but because of how it was written. The author's choices for executing the story was unfortunately disappointing. I thought Bram Stoker was this master of the vampire mythos, that's why a lot of people praise him for Dracula. But when I was reading the book, I really couldn't see it. Maybe at the beginning it was okay, because Dracula was there in the beginning. But after that...the dudes gone.
We don't get to see Dracula anymore for the rest of the book. Everything else is just scenes where Van Helsing goes on a ranting spree about the history of vampires and shit like that. And this goes on for chapters and chapters and chapters long. I gave up on the book, and moved on to read other books I could've read instead.
For Frankenstein, however, it was sort of an opposite reaction.
It took me like months just so I could get to the middle of Dracula. But in Frankenstein, it only took me like half a month to finish it. In Dracula, there's like ten percent of Dracula. In Frankenstein, the monster has more dialogue than Victor Frankenstein. I didn't expect that to be the case with this story, so that got me really interested.
My prejudice for Frankenstein was that I thought it would be more of the journey the professor makes into making his experiment. But to my surprise, the monster is introduced in like, the 5th chapter of the story. That was damn early, but it worked somehow.
There were a lot of parallels between Frankenstein and the story of the Creation of Man. Victor Frankenstein's arc sort of felt like he was God in this story, and the monster is his Adam. The monster actually calls himself Adam at one point. And because he was lonely, he wanted Victor Frankenstein to make him a companion. "A Female Companion", he says, or could have literally said, to prove the point I'm trying to make.
When the monster asks that of Victor Frankenstein, that really got me shocked. That was when I started seeing the parallels in the story. Shelley wrote something that ended up being bigger than what she might've intended to do. After that, I was just really wanting to find out if Victor would create the Eve for Adam.
The monster sort of felt like Bane to me. The way his dialogue is written is so Shakespearean that I just, could not. It's either that, or Vincent D'Onofrio's portrayal of Wilson Fisk in Daredevil, where you don't really root for the guy, but because he told you his story, you kind of understand his side, and to a point, sympathize with the Monster as well. It was like that for this book, which I really liked.
But what took me away from it was how it was written. There's really something about old literature, that they really take their time on describing things. Like full-on paragraphs-long dialogue. You'd start to wonder that if filmmakers made a movie out of this, and stuck with the actual dialogue of each character, one conversation would probably last for like twenty minutes on average.
Other than that, I dunno. I expected something more, but the way it ended did not deliver for me. Just like how I'm gonna end this book review.
Rating System:
Story = 8.5
Writing Style = 6.9
Physical Synesthesia = 7
Time it took to finish = like three weeks or so = 8
Price = P99.00 = 9
Overall = 7.9/10
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