Rubriques
A Monster's Notes
Type de publication:
BookAuteurs:
Scheck, LaurieSource:
Knopf, p.544 (2009)Texte complet:
What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein’s monster but had
met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother’s grave, and
he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever
changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a
time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century?
This
bold, genre-defying book brings us the “monster” in his own words. He
recalls how he was “made” and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He
ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life
with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative,
along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting
mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human
striving—from the music of John Cage to robotics to the Northern
explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own—as he tries to understand
the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of
mind.
In the course of the monster’s musings, we also see Mary
Shelley’s life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy
Bysshe Shelley, her writing of Frankenstein, the births and
deaths of her children, Shelley’s famous drowning, her widowhood, her
subsequent travels and life’s work, and finally her death from a brain
tumor at age fifty-four. The monster’s fierce bond with Mary and the
tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story,
a story of two beings who can never forget each other.
A Monster’s Notes
is Sheck’s most thrilling work to date, a luminous meditation on
creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and
beauty, and on our need to be understood.