Thumbs up for Frankenstein
This wasn’t what I expected. There was no castle, for one; no skulking shades in the thunderstorm; and not really much man-vs-monster fisticuffs. (And certainly no one named Igor.) Frankenstein’s monster is literate, sensitive, and sympathetic; and the hero spends more time reflecting on the beauties of the Swiss Alps than he ever spends mano-a-monster. I’m not saying that’s wrong – I liked this book a lot. But boy…I wonder whether Mel Brooks actually read it before making Young Frankenstein. I should have known better than to form expectations based on the gestalt. Do yourself a favor. Read the original.
“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself I look on the hands which executed the deed; think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.”
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