… Out of Control | by Richard Holmes | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After two hundred years, how exactly are we to go back to the novel itself, as distinct from its proliferating, multimedia myth? The highly complex literary structure, after all, consists of three overlapping autobiographies—by the explorer Robert Walton, by Frankenstein, and by the Creature himself—each cunningly nested one inside the other, each with a different voice, a different timeframe, and a different view of the historic experiment and its terrible consequences. It seems to combine several genres at once: grim gothic melodrama, exuberant science fiction, satiric cautionary tale, passionate moral parable, and even (especially in its superb evocation of mountains and polar regions) the vivid, unreeling panoramas of a Romantic adventure story.
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