A Monster's Notes [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Laurie Sheck (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 23, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Respected poet Sheck delivers a classic poet's first novel, a long, polyphonic, often directionless sprawl of unconventional narrative. In her poetry, Sheck has striven to mimic the kinesis of the modern mind: an entrapped being, self-consciously at odds with its literary predecessors. But in the shift to fiction, much of her trademark momentum is lost and her fervent brilliance stretched thin. The book takes the perspective of Frankenstein's monster and interweaves his œnotes on the human race with fictionalized letters of his creator, author Mary Shelley. (Sheck imagines Shelley to have met the monster as a little girl, sitting by her mother's grave.) It's an unwieldy project that, like the monster's body, feels off-kilter and ill-proportioned, while its organizational scheme (by topics of the monster's interest, such as John Cage's prepared piano or the ethics of genetic privacy) can make the reading experience feel rather encyclopedic. Still, Sheck's effulgent, elegant wisdom is impossible to deny. She may not yet be a storyteller, but she is a superb lyricist, and in this new work, she comes across as a fearless philosopher for our times. (June)
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From The New Yorker

Rather as Michael Cunningham used “Mrs. Dalloway” in “The Hours,” the poet Laurie Sheck places Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” at the center of a varied and obsessively researched narrative canvas, encompassing such matters as early explorations of the Arctic Circle and the untimely deaths of Shelley’s mother, half sister, small children, and husband. The most successful set piece is an uncanny fable that portrays Frankenstein’s monster as an enigmatic but compassionate spirit who briefly appears to Shelley in her girlhood, takes umbrage at the violence of her novel, and survives into the present to observe the work’s long life in popular culture. Not all the digressions are equally gripping, but Sheck provides a provocative metaphor for spiritual and technological crisis: in the last pages, a being without identity cowers in a squalid room, hunting the Internet for a trace of its creator.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (June 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307271056
• ISBN-13: 978-0307271051
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #849,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Greatly Interesting and Disappointing, July 13, 2009

By 

Steve Booth-Butterfield (Morgantown, WV USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Monster's Notes (Hardcover)

"A Monster's Notes" is a strange, interesting, and unique work of literary imagination. If you picked it up in a library or bookstore and started reading it, the overwhelming majority of readers would be both intrigued and confused. The novels depends upon a huge backstory that is not apparent in the text. It also employs techniques that are nonstandard for novels. There is no formal narrative or character or plot in the sense of those terms you'd use with Cervantes or Dickens or Hemingway or whomever you prefer. Instead, the work advances through a collage form: It combines letters, notes, and observations. It is truly strange, weird, and unsettled.

Because it is strange I would encourage you to read it.

Because it is weak, I would encourage you to read it while sitting in a library or bookstore, rather than buying it now or even purchasing a used paperback edition.

Laurie Sheck's literary experiment ultimately fails and does not warrant widespread careful reading once, much less twice. It starts with a superb postmodern premise - what if "Frankenstein" was not fiction, but fact - and then falls away, page after page for five hundred pages - five hundred pages of one epigram or one sentence or one paragraph of text in some instances.

Imagine that Victor Frankenstein created life and that the monster lived among us. And that the monster knew Mary Bysshe Shelley/Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; inspired her to write; then lived past her death and the death of her circle; and lived into our times. If this doesn't start an imaginative fire in you, then your wood's wet.

But, from this striking, bright, and hot idea, Laurie Sheck produces a weak, quivering, and fragmented accomplishment that does not bear careful reading or consideration. For me.

For you?

Please scan the book in a library or store or with a first chapter on your device - Kindle, iPod, or iPhone - or thorough blog.

You could read the "Iliad" or "Don Quixiote" or . . . again, you know. But, "A Monster's Notes" is worth observation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unique and unconventional, July 22, 2009

By 

Z Hayes (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Monster's Notes (Hardcover)

I picked this book up because "Frankenstein" is one of my favorite horror novels of all time [right up there with "Dracula"]. Also the premise was intriguing: What if Mary Shelley's classic monster of literature wasn't fiction, but a real character? One who visits Shelley as a young girl visiting her mother's [feminist Mary Wollstonecraft] grave? This is the premise of "A Monster's Notes", and the creature here is imagined to have survived into the 21st century, afflicted by questions regarding its identity, as what the creature understands about itself is based on the background Shelley created for it in the original story.

The book in essence, is based on the monster's musings based on fictionalized letters from Shelley, her inner circle, and two other characters [both fictional], one from the original "Frankenstein", and the other a leper in an Italian sanatorium. The letters are included in the book as part of the creature's journal, and besides the letters, there are notes on music, philosophy, and a host of other subjects.

Though the author deserves praise for taking a unique approach to the novel format, as a reader, I found myself rather mired in the the writing, which tends to get heavy-going. What I did like was the fleshing out of some of the characters, such as Shelley and her exploits. Through the convoluted letters and notes, Shelley's creature comes to gain a deeper perspective of how he came to be, though the entire mystery of the creature is never completely solved.

Recommended for those who like to get adventurous in their reading choices.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Creature Speaks, October 2, 2009

By 

Bill Bowler (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Monster's Notes (Hardcover)

"Laurie Sheck's "A Monster's Notes" has a great Frankenstein mash-up concept, but it's a very challenging read. Those seeking a more straightforward, action-filled and romantic re-imagining of Mary Shelley's classic might look at Gary Inbinder's Confessions of the Creature.Confessions of the Creature

In Confessions of the Creature, Frankenstein's monster survives his creator's arctic pursuit. He travels south until he meets a sympathetic Russian granny who uses magic to transform the creature into a normal looking man. The metamorphosed monster falls in love with a beautiful aristocrat, marries, has a daughter and leads the Russian armies to victory over Napoleon Bonaparte. After the war, he meets Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and, of course, Frankenstein's author, Mary Godwin Shelley. There's also an interesting subplot involving Frankenstein's relationship to the Illuminati at the University of Ingolstadt. This might make a good companion work to "A Monster's Notes," especially for those Frankenstein aficionados who want to compare and contrast."