Frankensteins

comma noneuropean

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118) Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, finished on November 26

Teaching Frankenstein for the umpteenth time this year, I was startled by a new experience. A student came to class rattled, emotionally wounded, by the De Lacey's casual anti-Islamic sentiments. This anti-Turkish portion of the book is short and really just a convenient excuse for certain bits of plot and character. We were able to incorporate it into our understanding of the novel and what it's larger aims might be, but I left the experience uncertain how no other Muslim student had ever called out this scene before.

(Incidentally, although it works well, thematically, in Frankenstein, I do think "Islamophobia" was a blindspot of Mary Shelley's. There's more of it [and worse of it] in The Last Man.)

Anyway, this girl asked me to write a letter of rec for her college apps and I decided to incorporate this experience into her letter. I decided to pull out the fun fact that Frankenstein is the most-taught work of fiction in American universities, then thought I might find it one syllabi at the university I was writing.

Instead, I was distracted by finding this.

I shared the link with her and she had bought and read the book before I was even twenty pages into it. (My local library had a copy.)

Anyway, I've now finished it. And it was good.

Basically, a guy (just a guy) finds pieces of bombing victims and puts them together until he has full body. A soul, also displaced by a car bomb, finds the body and brings it to life. This living thing then sets about avenging each piece of itself.

In the course of the novel, we pass through many, many point-of-view characters.But the Whatitsname, only indirectly, by listening to a recording of him telling his story.

(That choice, incidentally, felt like the most direct nod to Shelley, perhaps even more than the creature's existence itself.)

Reading this novel was certainly "good for me" in that it helped demolish my single story of wartorn Iraq, and I enjoyed my time spent with the characters. But for some reason I can't quite explain to myself, I was never pulled into the story. I always felt distant from them. I don't know if it was the (frankly, rather boring) plot or the fiddlings with chronology or the framing choice which made everyone slightly less real (although I think it was intended to have the opposite effect?), but in the end, it became a book I finish because it's a library book. If I owned it, instead of saying four weeks in the next line, it would probably say four years.

four weeks

119) Clockwork Curandera, Volume I: The Witch Owl Parliament by David Bowles & Raúl The Third, finished on November 26

This comic is part of the burgeoning tradition of American fantasy, my favorite of which has been the recent Witchy series. This one takes place in fictional nations around our world's Mexico/Texas border. It has a lot of steampunk and traditional magic and so on and so forth.

The Kickstarter left me rather uncertain, but it did say it was "steampunk graphic novel reimagining of Frankenstein set in colonial Mexico," and how could I ignore that? So I bought it and now I've read it. And I'm afraid all my worries came true.

The art is cool, with retro flourishes from multiple eras and styles. But aspects (the use of accent color, for instance) don't seem to have any purpose—they just look cool. And it's given an oldtimey paper background. But it's just the couple sheets of oldtimey paper repeated over and over. Plus, so much exposition explaining things—I get why this is a comic, but I think the world and the story likely would have been better served by a novel.

The Frankenstein aspect is more Branagh than Shelley: our hero is killed in the opening pages and her brother, an alchemist, brings her back to life. Her sudden transition into an abomination makes things more complicated (allegedly, everyone says that other people don't like alchemy/homosexuality/shapeshifting/certainmagics but every authority figure given a chance in the book works hard to show that they are cool with it).

Ultimately, it's just trying to do too many things, and they don't fit comfortably in a book this short, only a small percentage of which is actually words.

Not surprisingly, you don't have to look far for someone to disagree with me (example) and I suspect the book may work better for younger readings. I'll hand it off to my 12yrold who thinks it looks cool and see what he thinks.

four days