Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

In the two hundred years since its publication, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein has permeated our culture. The story has been adapted for plays and films; published in many different book editions with various prefaces, introductions, end notes, illustrations, and supplemental materials. Frankenstein shows up in cartoons. Little monsters ring our doorbells at Halloween.

Yet, despite the ubiquity of the story, few of us had read it. It is a very old book which tests our patience with19th century literary conventions. It has a quaint Russian doll structure with the exotic Arabian’s story tucked inside the monster’s story, absorbed into Victor Frankenstein’s story, transcribed by the sea captain in a years-long series of letters to his sister in England. We chafed at that, and the long family lineages, paeans to nature, and over-shared emotional states. And particularly, we disliked the whining of Victor Frankenstein. Nonetheless, we persisted with our usual lively discussions.

To summarize the story: Privileged, young Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy (aka science), decides to stitch together scavenged body parts and bring them to life. And one dark and stormy night, he does. But when his creation turns out to be big and ugly and scary, Victor flees in horror, abandoning his newborn.

One of the most interesting parts of the story for several of us was the middle where the creature grows up, as it were, becoming aware of his senses, learning how to find nourishment and moving through the world, discerning right from wrong. By his intimate observation of neighbors he watches from his hovel, he learns about family. During his time of watching and secretly helping them with their chores, he hears the tale of the beautiful Arabian woman, and he learns about romantic love. When he needs a broader understanding of Western history and the circumstances of his own origins, he happens upon books and letters in satchels and pockets. He is kind and intuitive. And very, very lonely.

Plan A to solve his loneliness is to become so kind and cultured he will be warmly welcomed in society despite his physical grotesqueness. But those hopes are dashed when he gets beaten and chased away by the people in the cottage he has been secretly observing and looks on as his friends.

Plan B is to obtain a mate like himself that they may live in isolation together. Knowing, by this time, how he came to be and who gave him life, he finds Victor Frankenstein and makes his request. Frankenstein waffles, saying no, then yes, then no again. The creature becomes so angry and frustrated, he lashes out and begins to murder people dear to Victor.

By the end, Frankenstein, having searched the Alps for his creation that he may kill it, dies after telling the whole misadventure, from beginning to the end, to a ship’s captain, Robert Walton, who is aspiring to reach the North Pole. Shortly after Victor dies, the creature finds his creator’s body on the ship and asks forgiveness for killing people whom Frankenstein loved, but still he presses his case: (addressing the captain)

You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and friendship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be considered the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me . . . Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

After his rant, he announces his intention to go into the icy climes and build his own funeral pyre.

I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames . . . My spirit will sleep in peace; or, if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

And he leaps out the cabin window onto an ice raft and drifts into darkness.

Mary Shelley gives her creature an anti-heroic/Miltonic/Shakespearian grand exit, but she lets Victor Frankenstein just fade away. So where do the author’s sympathies lie? Who is the monster? What are the responsibilities of creation? What happens when we’re not loved? What are the perils of loving? Of loneliness? Why do we seem cursed to judge by appearances?

During our final week of discussing Frankenstein, we had the perk of hosting a local author who has done primary-source research on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. We came to understand more fully the abandonment issues which Mary, left motherless after only a few days, likely felt. She spent her young years living in acrimony with her stepmother until she was banished to Scotland by her father, so she likely had more than one critical feeling about the familial creator who abandoned his inherently good and hopeful child. Yet according to her diaries, she thrived with the Baxter family in Scotland, riding, reading, and soaking up lots of scary Scottish lore. There she met Percy Shelley and began an affair with him. While traveling with him and a friend in Switzerland, during a confining day of bad weather, they each committed to write a story founded on some supernatural occurrence. As she brags in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she was the only one to complete the challenge.

And thus the science fiction genre was born.

We spent four weeks on this slender volume, finding much to learn and discuss: the differences between the original 1818 edition and the revised 1831 edition, the literary conventions of 19th century novels, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s famous but absent feminist mother, the abandonment by her father, the grief from the loss of three children, the perpetual drama of a vagabond life with Percy Shelley and her dedication to transcribing his poetry after his death. Plus, the specter of genteel poverty always hovering while she raised her only surviving child, a son, and wrote six more novels. All this in a time when women were vulnerable in so many ways.

A life bravely lived life, Mary Shelley. R.I.P.

— Sharelle Moranville

Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall, by Helena Merriman

What most of us have forgotten about the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, or never knew, would fill a book. And here is that book: Tunnel 29. 

At times it seemed like the Cold War, an ideological and economic conflict between the US and the USSR, focused on Berlin, the capital of Germany. It was indeed the point of closest friction between the communist and capitalist worlds from 1945 to 1989. At the end of World War 2, Germany was divided into four zones, each to be administered by one of the major Allied Powers. Berlin, located 100 miles inside the Soviet Zone, was similarly divided, creating a boundary through the middle of a densely populated urban area, following and dividing streets, alleys, the river, and arbitrary lines. In the early days, movement of people and municipal services was relatively open across the zones of Berlin.

That ended abruptly in 1961 when the communist government of East Germany decided to stop the outflow of people and talent to the West. Overnight, the boundary became real, first with barbed wire and soon with a concrete wall, and eventually with a 100-meter kill strip in front of the Wall. The Wall was also enforced by the Stasi, a secret police organization that recruited informants that informed on friends, family, neighbors and strangers.

Yet the pressure for East Berliners to move west continued. Family and relatives were on the other side. So were better jobs, better consumer goods, and political freedom. Human ingenuity worked tirelessly on means of escape: forged papers, hiding in cars and trucks, and tunnels.

In Tunnel 29, Helena Merriman gives us an intimate view into the digging of one of these tunnels – well, actually two. Researching escape projects after 50 years surely limited her choices, but she found Joachim Rudolph, a key member of this tunnel team, who had detailed recall of this project. From his memories she is able to take us inside the tunnel, appreciate the student engineering the diggers used to construct the 120-meter tunnel, remove the dirt, brace the structure and locate the terminal point. She retells the flooding that led the diggers to try an alternate tunnel, then revert to the first location after the sub rosa cooperation of the West Berlin water authorities cured the flooding. Yes, the tunnel was dug from West Berlin into East.  The excellent Stasi documentation let her trace and tell the story of Siegfried, a Stasi agent who infiltrated the project in order to report on it. She lets us see the organizing of the 29 East Berliners who would escape through the tunnel and the almost comedic work of Ellen Sesta on escape day, bringing the 29 to the tunnel opening in an East Berlin apartment. It is a tale of courage, fear, risk, circumstance, and determination. 

Oh yes, and it was all documented by NBC TV News. Reuven Frank was new to TV journalism and needed a story. Joachim’s project needed resources and money.  As we noted in our group’s discussion, you couldn’t get away with such an improbable tale in fiction. But it really did result in an award-winning TV documentary. It provided a great case study for discussion of journalistic ethics.

The thorough documentation of this particular escape allowed follow-up of the participants as they rebuilt their lives in West Germany. Some thrived in the capitalist world; others did not fare so well. Our group found this story compelling in its own right, but appreciated its extra dimensions of Cold War history, TV journalism, communist societies, and the role of walls today.

— Bill Smith

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, by Kirsten Miller

This has been one of my favorite reads of the year. It’s entertaining, relevant, and easy to read with laugh out loud pithy statements on today’s hot topics. Yet it shows real world consequences with the events happening in our society today. 

Lula Dean and Beverly Underwood have been rivals in Lula Dean’s mind since the high school cheerleading squad separated the girls. Living in Troy, Alabama, the women are now wives and mothers, with Beverly being the School Board President and Lula Dean living in her pink house with unrequited dreams of being a force in the community. 

Pornography was found in the baking section of the local library. It didn’t matter that the book on erotic cake decorating had been slipped into the shelves by a 13 year old prankster, but with this Lula Dean has found her calling! The children of Troy are in peril! Getting together with a group of like minded citizens, Lula and her cohorts get right to work listing books that “no right minded Christian would allow the precious children of this god fearing community to read.” Finding the same list online was proof that they had picked the right ones. 

The Concerned Parents Committee ransacked the high school, middle school, elementary and local libraries of these books. When the pictures of the confiscated books were shown on Facebook the question arose: What shall we do with these books? The answer came loud and clear–Burn them! 

An emergency community meeting the next night saw Beverly deciding that the school board would look into the matter of the books. Until a decision of how to handle the situation was reached, the books were to be stored in Beverly’s basement. 

The next morning an article about the books appears in the local paper with a picture of Lula standing next to a cabinet housing her library on her front lawn. Lula Dean’s Little Lending Library of wholesome books. 

Beverly’s daughter, Lindsay, who is gay and just heading off to her first year of college, is terribly unhappy with the situation, feeling that her mother should have handled the whole thing better. 

In the dark of night, the books in Lula’s library are switched from “wholesome” to banned with the bookcovers hiding the real titles. These books of literary classics, Black history, gay romance, Judy Blume novels and books of “witchy spells” replace Lula’s books of “The Southern Bell’s Guide to Ediquett”, “101 Cakes to Bake for your Family”, and “The Art of the Deal”. 

This sets off unexpected and unsettling events with the inhabitants of the town as they access the lending library. Lindsay, by changing the books, has kicked over a rock that had been long undisturbed-–exposing unsavory creatures living below to crawl out from under. “Nazis, rapists, and murderers, not to mention hypocritics and opportunists”– crawl out and are exposed to the community. 

A suicide of one the town’s most challenging inhabitants unearths a manifesto detailing a would be massacre on the of the people of Troy. A local Confederate general’s statue in front of the City Hall comes tumbling down as the descendants rebel against the false told tale of his honor and glory. 

All comes to a satisfying ending for Lula Dean. 

Our book club, as we like to do, discussed the cover enjoying the color, the little library of books with the lit match giving us thoughts of the novel “Fahrenheit 451.” We were very satisfied and delighted when the book cover was removed. Discover for yourself this intriguing and relevant book. It does not disappoint. 

— Deb Krueger