while you're ahead…

Frankisstein (a love story)

Genius.

Absolutely genial and profound.

I wasn’t sure what to expect because I don’t really know Winterson’s style (I had only read her first biography ‘Oranges are not the only fruit’ which I loved, but not any other of her books) AND I’d never read the original Mary Shelley’s classic.

I needn’t have worried, although I do think it helps knowing a little about Frankestein’s story and about Mary and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley. (In all honesty all I knew was gained from watching the movie about her life – entitled, funnily enough ‘Mary Shelley’… jokes aside, it’s a good movie)

The book, beautifully written is hard to describe although in short is a re-telling of the famous tale in modern times; the plot shifts from when Mary and Percy are staying with Byron and other guests in a villa on Lake Geneva where Byron challenges them all to write a scary story… – the rest is history, for Mary – … these scenes are wonderful and atmospheric and gothic… to a dystopian not too distant future where a transgender Dr Ry (short for … yes, Mary) Shelley falls in love with an AI genius called Victor Stein, obsessed with living forever. There is a lot more to the plot, but I don’t want to spoil it too much because it’s an incredibly clever book that weaves together a lot of the issues we are facing: gender, identity, artificial intelligence, immortality, robots. It is also about the agency we have in choosing who we are in the world.

It’s a book that makes you question what does it mean to be human. What makes us who we are? is it our mind? our biology? what would planting our mind in a computer mean for humankind in general? Would that be a monster? Can computers be living things? Or would they be just monsters?

It’s about love for life in all its forms.

Absolutely fascinating.

It’s funny and ironic too. So very very clever. The names of the characters, the personalities they’re given… there’s a lot of ‘play’ on the original obviously so I guess if you know Shelley’s book you’ll love this even more. I’ve had to do a bit of googling here and there to make sure I didn’t miss too many connections.

As a retelling of a classic… it’s brilliant.

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I realised that the first review of this book was quite flippant and superficial… I read it as part of my course in Crime Fiction and the more I delved into the subject the more I thought about it and the more I felt the need to revised what I’d written.

What a surprising read this was.

Robert Blair is a lawyer in a small town, whose biggest worry is that he’s getting tired of ‘the inevitability of the biscuit routine: the placid certainty that it would be digestive von a Thursday and petit-beurre on a Monday. […] … once or twice lately an odd, alien thought had crossed his mind, irrelevant and unbidden. As nearly as it could be put into words it was: ‘This is all you are ever going to have’. And with the thought would come that moment’s constriction in his chest.’

And then the phone rings.

Marion Sharpe, a spinster, and her elderly mother live in a big Manor House and they’ve been accused of having kept a fifteen year old girl locked up in their attic, beaten her and starved her.

There is no dead body, no blood spilled, only lots of classic sleuthing, question asked, linear narrative, places analysed, backgrounds checked, personality studied. We know from the beginning who to root for and who the ‘badies’ are… there isn’t much in terms of classical suspense… – it’s not scary – however it will keep you gripped and entertained till the end. It’s the perfect winter afternoon read, big comfortable chair and giant cup of tea.

That is one way of reading the novel, and it’s what I did during the Christmas holidays… BUT, there’s a lot more about it… Under the surface it is actually quite dark. Kidnapping and beating? Young under-age girls, – manipulated or manipulative – in under-age relationships, lying, shaming, snobbery… I could go on. But it’s all wrapped up in a nice, cozy narrative in middle class England that it fools you.

It’s dated, clumsy in its social representation and stereotyping… there’s a lot of tea mentioned and tweed and golf, and good claret… but… we must keep in mind the time it was written… by modern standards there are some problematic issues relating to social classes and toxic masculinity, and sexism, but that can be applied to any book written in times, I think that as long as one is aware of these and is critical of them, this book can still be enjoyable.

Read it, I still encourage you to, but perhaps don’t get too comfortable on that chair. Maybe that is the sign of a well written book… it tricks you into believing everything is ok when it’s not… what do you think?

With that in mind, I still enjoyed it. It made me smile, it was well written and I liked the characters… regardless of the slightly gruesome premises.

I was in New York quite a few years ago, Mr M was there for work and I played ‘corporate wife’… ie went around museums and walked miles and miles and showed up for business dinners. It was fun. Anyway, I stumbled upon this lovely bookstore, wooden shelves, soft carpet, just the right amount of darkness and light, hush tones and buzz… I can’t remember the name, but I got chatting with the owner, a very dignified old gentleman that probably had read more books in his life that I could ever aspire to and was very gracious with all my questions… we talked books, especially all the New York authors – I was really into Paul Auster at the time, still am, he’s a great writer, and he recommended a few others.

He really impressed on my how important it is to read a local author when travelling, or a novel set in the location at least, in order to get a new perspective, a diverse point of view.

Reading Celestial Bodies was a real eye opener. It made me realised how I only read books from British and American writers with he odd Italian one thrown into the mix, and actually there’s a whole world out there full of amazing novels that are just waiting to be discovered…

Shockingly shortsighted on my part.

This novel follows the life of three sisters in Oman, and touches on their customs and traditions, their marriages and the life of the people around them too. The chapters alternate between their stories and ones narrated in the first person by the husband of one of them, Abdullah, raised by his cruel father’s slave (and lover) after his own mother had died in childbirth. It won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and it was quite a challenging read not only because of the subject matter, but also the way it was structured was different from what I’m used to. Simple things like the richness of the descriptions, the mentions of beliefs and rituals, the history of the country I knew absolutely nothing about, and even the structure of the sentences was different.

Oman is such a mystery to me, and reading this book left me with a keen desire to actually travel properly and see more of this beautiful country. The fact that the food is amazing … does help!

Any foreign books you would recommend?