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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I thought this was so interesting and I liked that it was different than my normal reads. The alternating time-line plus having so many different side characters made the story a bit confusing at times, but I thought the writing and pacing was good.
dark
mysterious
reflective
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
dark
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Most bad books are bad in the same few ways: poor writing, poor plotting, poor characterization, etc. But occasionally, a book is bad in a new and exciting way that its badness (appropriately for this book) takes on an almost erotic thrill. All this to say that the thing that pushed me over the edge to give Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein 1 pitiful star wasn't the dull pacing or the muddled prose; it was the excess of nipples. If I were sent back to 1816, I could identify Mary Shelley by her nipples alone. I could pick her nipples out of a police lineup. Her nipples are going to haunt me for the rest of my life. Her nipples are more myself than my own. It's relentless. Hers aren't the only nipples repeatedly described in laborious detail, but they were by far the worst offender. Are you sick of reading the word 'nipples'? Do you wish I would change the subject to literally anything else? Good. You understand what reading this book was like.
Going off that point, it's pretty easy to see the point that I believe Anne Eekhout was trying to make in her dual timelines. Breasts as a source of pleasure (both Mary's and Isabella's) in the past timeline versus breasts as a source of life in the present timeline, the way those two things overlap and feed into each other, motherhood as a consequence of a man's pleasure (but not necessarily a woman's), your body no longer belonging to yourself, the struggle to reconcile the erotic self with the familial self, et cetera, et cetera. This reading is not subtle nor difficult to tease out of the prose. Unfortunately, the prose is so boring that engaging one's brain while reading it makes Sisyphus's uphill climb look like a kid playing with marbles. And with that, I promise not to talk about boobs again for the rest of the review.
Unfortunately, there isn't much left to talk about because I kept falling asleep despite this book being barely 300 pages. It was so boring that I could only read about 20 pages at a time before my brain started fantasizing about what I was having for dinner. Not only is the pacing so stagnant it hardly moves at all but Eekhout prizes ambiguity and vibes above all else. The prose aims for dreamy and hallucinatory in the same way that a film with strong visuals but a weak script will have a non-linear timeline to trick the audience into thinking there's something clever below the surface. While a film can be passively consumed—background while one doomscrolls or plays subway surfers—a book demands your full attention; it cannot be absorbed with only half of one's brain. Reading is a collaborative experience, but I almost wished I could play Subway Surfers while reading this to make it through. There is no plot, no character development, no answers. No thoughts, head empty, just vibes. What exactly happened to Isabella's sister? What's the deal with Mr. Booth? Why do we spend so much time talking about fish heads? I can't tell you, and neither, I fear, can Eekhout. None of this matters except that it makes a good story, as Shelley sought in writing Frankenstein and as Eekhout failed in her reinterpretation of its conception.
Frankenstein as a monstrous birth is not untrod territory; it's quite a common reading of the text, but if you're looking for a deeper examination of those themes, you'll fail to find them here.
The only good thing about Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein is the excellent translator's note by Laura Watkinson. It's a wonderful look into the translation process. I think for audiences who don't read a ton of literature in translation, which I suspect a lot of Anglophones are, it's easy to ignore translation, seeing it as an invisible labour. Only in the back half of this year did I make a conscious effort to read more translated literature, and it's made me much more aware of how I approach reading on a granular level. Watkinson makes an excellent point about translation not necessarily being from one language to another but from one culture to another, one time to another. When a Dutch author writes a scene where her English protagonist eats a meal of bread and fish, what sort of bread and fish is the author picturing? What about the protagonist? What about an English-speaking audience reading this scene written over 200 years after its protagonist lived? Really fascinating stuff for such an awful book. Like finding a diamond buried at the very bottom of a pile of shit.
1816. A heady summer finds eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley, their baby son, and her narcissistic step-sister Claire. In company with the infamous Lord Byron and his friend Dr John Polidori, this should be a time for freedom and creativity, but Mary is haunted by memories of her dead daughter and tortured by anxiety over Shelley's infidelity. Increasingly uncomfortable with some of the bohemian values that seduced her, Mary feels a darkness stirring within her that demands to be set free.
One stormy evening, while the group use laudanum laced-wine to let their imaginations and desires come out to play, Byron sets them a challenge to write a ghost story. In her over-wrought state, Mary begins to remember an eerie summer four years ago, and draws on these memories to create a story like no other...
Part reimagining of the time in 1812 that Mary spent among the Baxter family in Scotland, and part exploration of how she began writing her classic horror tale, Frankenstein, in 1816, Eekhout moves between the two summers with slow-burn magic to create an intriguing twist on the Mary Shelley story.
In the 1812 sections, Eekhout runs riot with fictional storylines about folklore, witchcraft, secret laboratories, grotesque figures from freak shows, sapphic love, and whispers of murder, to weave a delicious Gothic tale. Eekhout then, quite brilliantly, uses Mary's memories and her experience of the deeply unsettling relationships in the Baxter household to embroider what we know of the time she later spent on Lake Geneva plagued by ghosts, to explain how this complicated young woman was inspired to write a masterpiece.
There is an intoxicating essence to this novel, which proves to be highly addictive. Eekhout heightens this feeling with fever-dream like scenes fuelled by alcohol, laudanum, and passion that completely consume you. You never really know how much of what Mary sees is real or imagined, but prepare to be drawn in, held spellbound, and genuinely frightened all the same. I also really enjoyed how Eekhout cleverly floods the novel with the very themes of life and death; science and religion; beauty and horror; and love and loss, which echo through Frankenstein itself.
I think this is the most compelling book I have read about Mary Shelley yet, in the way it speculates about the passions that drove her and the complexities of her personality. I offer up high praise to the translator Laura Wilkinson too, who has clearly done an exceptional job preserving the intensity of atmosphere and emotion throughout. This is an absolute must for anyone interested in the unconventional life Mary Shelley led, the brilliance of her mind, and the quite astonishing novel that sprang from her imagination.
One stormy evening, while the group use laudanum laced-wine to let their imaginations and desires come out to play, Byron sets them a challenge to write a ghost story. In her over-wrought state, Mary begins to remember an eerie summer four years ago, and draws on these memories to create a story like no other...
Part reimagining of the time in 1812 that Mary spent among the Baxter family in Scotland, and part exploration of how she began writing her classic horror tale, Frankenstein, in 1816, Eekhout moves between the two summers with slow-burn magic to create an intriguing twist on the Mary Shelley story.
In the 1812 sections, Eekhout runs riot with fictional storylines about folklore, witchcraft, secret laboratories, grotesque figures from freak shows, sapphic love, and whispers of murder, to weave a delicious Gothic tale. Eekhout then, quite brilliantly, uses Mary's memories and her experience of the deeply unsettling relationships in the Baxter household to embroider what we know of the time she later spent on Lake Geneva plagued by ghosts, to explain how this complicated young woman was inspired to write a masterpiece.
There is an intoxicating essence to this novel, which proves to be highly addictive. Eekhout heightens this feeling with fever-dream like scenes fuelled by alcohol, laudanum, and passion that completely consume you. You never really know how much of what Mary sees is real or imagined, but prepare to be drawn in, held spellbound, and genuinely frightened all the same. I also really enjoyed how Eekhout cleverly floods the novel with the very themes of life and death; science and religion; beauty and horror; and love and loss, which echo through Frankenstein itself.
I think this is the most compelling book I have read about Mary Shelley yet, in the way it speculates about the passions that drove her and the complexities of her personality. I offer up high praise to the translator Laura Wilkinson too, who has clearly done an exceptional job preserving the intensity of atmosphere and emotion throughout. This is an absolute must for anyone interested in the unconventional life Mary Shelley led, the brilliance of her mind, and the quite astonishing novel that sprang from her imagination.
a fabulist history of mary shelley's travels— her time in cologny during the inception/writing of frankenstein, and her months spent in scotland as a teenager
eekhout does a fantastic job of imbuing shelley's life with magic, of giving a sense of her as someone who feels deeply & who connects deeply with fantasy and storytelling and myth. this is also a novel that's about grief: the grief of losing a child, the grief of becoming a mother when one's own mother is dead, the grief of losing a lover / a friend / a certain understanding of the world
the translator also did a brilliant job with the prose, i enjoyed reading this!
eekhout does a fantastic job of imbuing shelley's life with magic, of giving a sense of her as someone who feels deeply & who connects deeply with fantasy and storytelling and myth. this is also a novel that's about grief: the grief of losing a child, the grief of becoming a mother when one's own mother is dead, the grief of losing a lover / a friend / a certain understanding of the world
the translator also did a brilliant job with the prose, i enjoyed reading this!
Voor mij zijn mijn gevoelens over dit boek erg uiteenlopend. Het duurde lang voor ik een duidelijk beeld had op de vele personages en moest regelmatig de ‘stamboom’ aan het begin van het boek herbekijken. Eens over de helft kwam het verhaal meer op gang en kreeg ik het gevoel dat ik vat kreeg op het verhaal van Mary. Tot dat ik op het punt kwam dat er gewoon geen onderscheid meer was tussen werkelijkheid en haar fantasie. Dit aspect was zo verwarrend maar tegelijk erg intrigerend!
This was actually an airport buy, a very impromptu one, so yes I might have judged the book by its cover - sue me.
But I know that I’m also very much interested in OG monsters like Mr Dracula and Frankenstein so I was tempted to buy it.
First of all, I should have understood that this should be a boring read since the name of the book sounds like an unimaginative documentary. But it started unexpectedly moody and gripping and maybe because of my jet lag I had the urge to wake up earlier to read more before I start my day.
But the language, the narration was so dull and repetitive, after some time I lost all my interest and it started to feel like as it was a feature length film which should have been a short film instead.
Although I really appreciated the atmosphere building of the writer, rarely anything happens throughout the book and we are lost between two timelines which we cannot fully get into.
Sad to say that I literally suffered to finish the book so that Mary Shelley would relieve me of my pain.
But I know that I’m also very much interested in OG monsters like Mr Dracula and Frankenstein so I was tempted to buy it.
First of all, I should have understood that this should be a boring read since the name of the book sounds like an unimaginative documentary. But it started unexpectedly moody and gripping and maybe because of my jet lag I had the urge to wake up earlier to read more before I start my day.
But the language, the narration was so dull and repetitive, after some time I lost all my interest and it started to feel like as it was a feature length film which should have been a short film instead.
Although I really appreciated the atmosphere building of the writer, rarely anything happens throughout the book and we are lost between two timelines which we cannot fully get into.
Sad to say that I literally suffered to finish the book so that Mary Shelley would relieve me of my pain.