Frankenstein

Frankenstein was born from a challenge. In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old Englishwoman, Mary Shelley, was staying in a house near Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Shelley, the writer Lord Byron and the doctor John Polidori. Heavy rain kept them indoors, and Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story.

Mary spent days without an idea, until a conversation about experiments with electricity and life led her to a kind of waking dream: a pale student, kneeling beside a thing he had put together, watching it open its eyes. The novel grew out of that, published in 1818 without her name on the cover, with the subtitle The Modern Prometheus.

The book has little of the green monster with bolts in his neck that the movies made popular. It's a sadder and more philosophical story, about responsibility, loneliness and the consequences of what we create.

The novel opens with letters from Robert Walton, captain of an exploration ship, to his sister in England. He is looking for a passage through the North Pole and wants fame. The ship gets stuck in the ice. One morning, the crew sees a sled driven by a gigantic figure and, hours later, picks up another sled carrying a thin, sick, exhausted man.

It is Victor Frankenstein. Little by little he recovers and decides to tell Walton his story, saying that if he had heeded a warning in time, he might have avoided his misfortune. This story within a story is what makes up the book: letters that hold Victor's words, which hold the creature's words.

The structure works like a Russian doll and puts the reader in front of three people, each with his own truth. Nothing is told by a neutral voice, and it's up to the reader to judge who can be trusted.

Victor is born in Geneva, Switzerland, into a wealthy, loving family. His parents take in Elizabeth, a girl who grows up with him like a sister and who will later be his fiancée. He also has a childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and two younger brothers, Ernest and William.

His childhood is happy, but Victor has a hunger to know. He reads the old alchemists, dreams of discovering the secret of life and death and, when his mother dies of scarlet fever, caught while caring for Elizabeth, that hunger takes on the tone of a challenge. He then leaves to study at the university of Ingolstadt, in Germany.

Think of a young man from a small town who goes to study in the big city, with the glow of the first semesters and no family watching over him. The book shows how curiosity, without conversation and without limits, can turn into isolation.