Review: Frankenstein Was Not the Monster

Review: Daniel A. Olivas. Chicano Frankenstein. Portland: Forest Avenue Press, 2024. (link)

Foto essay: Daniel A. Olivas and Desirée Zamorano in Pasadena CA conversation

 

 

Michael Sedano

 

Daniel A. Olivas has found a fountain of creativity in the classics. Olivas' stage play, Waiting for Godínez, calls upon Samuel Beckett's Godot for inspiration. The novel, Chicano Frankenstein, calls upon Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff while weaving in allusions to Faust and a taste of Tomás Rivera. 

Olivas and Desirée Zamorano talked mostly about the novel in a recent conversation at Vroman's in Pasadena. Theirs was such an engaging conversation I was ready to stand in the long line for a chance to get my copy signed. People who weren't there can get a notion of the 210-page book's background and the author's process in the edition's dozen ancillary pages, the Acknowledgements and Author's Note, and book club questions.

The character Faustina's surname, Godínez, offers a sly allusion to Olivas' play, but more so to the concept of faustian bargains, forsaking one's soul in exchange for personal gratification. That this not the character, Faustina Godínez, shows that one can know too much or look too hard. 

Faustina is the founding partner of the man's job. This powerful woman hooks up with an underling, who is a reanimated man. Faustina follows-leads the novel's quest to learn the reanimated man's forbidden past and meet family. It's the novel's idea of finding one's identity in a world indifferent and hostile to your presence.

 

Daniel A. Olivas and Michael Sedano at Vroman's

But that Faust has little to do with Olivas' Faustina Godínez. Olivas isn't after some remote connection to German opera. Maybe the author simply likes the name. Faustina's a powerful Chicana lawyer attracted to a handsome Chicano paralegal and doesn't let the disparity at work stop her. The  fact Faustina's paramour is a reanimated person has no asco factor in Faustina's erotic impulses, the man is just another male in Faustina's book.

For readers with a prurient interest in details, Olivas grants them euphemistic gratification in a "just us girls" scene.

 

Olivas plays on the asco factor to build the novel's agon, the villain is a conservative electorate intolerant of difference, diversity, inclusion. The U.S. president is a foul person fully in control of that electorate and she propels hateful ideas into the world. 

Then again, it's only a pinche book. Kick back and enjoy it. Chicano Frankenstein's a gem. A fast and easy read; don't turn it into a head-scratcher.

 

The monster of public fame, the Boris Karloff character considered to be "Frankenstein", does not resemble the man, Faustina's lover. The man is not a monster but an everyday person. There's no reason to be all asqueroso. The Shelley / Movie characters overlap with Olivas' the man character in that both have limb transplants, and they live as reanimated corpses, and they aren't named.

 

Pasadena and Oxnard provide the settings for a future world where hundreds of thousands of people have been brought back to life by industrial processes. Reanimated people provide cheap labor and are remarkably honest. They come with a full set of work skills but no personal history nor physical resemblance to their first-life selves. They're in every walk of life, looking like any other person. One of them could be the mail room clerk.

 

Faustina, the man, these are middle class Chicanos in love. They do cute things like share bath soap, debate pink or white conchas, get to know one another with bilingual cariño. The novel's a love story but if that were all, it wouldn't be as interesting and redundant, think "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." 

 

Desirée Zamorano and Daniel A. Olivas share thoughts on the novel

Faustina has no trouble with loving and bedding a reanimated man, but there's lots of prejudice against stitchers, and peor, the president of the United States wants to lock them up, the reanimateds, the stitchers.

 

"Stitchers" is the "N" word for gente like the man. Olivas hides the character's name just as Shelley's reanimated character stays unnamed. Reanimated tipos count for shit to the foul-mouthed president of the United States. The president hates reanimateds with the kind of hatred arch conservatives hold for people of color. This wingnut president controls both houses of congress and has already outlawed the regeneration industry. 

 

Olivas acknowledges the fun.

Chicano Frankenstein is not only a love story but a political intrigue. The action carries us inside the Oval Office where things look bad for decent souls. The author chooses this setting to have a character named Toma explain that Victor Frankenstein created the Karloff-in-the-movies character so it's a misnomer to call reanimated people "Frankenstein". Toma!

Olivas reserves some special vitriol for Big Pharma, and newsmedia come off buffoonish. These elements--corruption, prejudice, buffoonery--hang over our lovers' affair and right to happiness.

Local color adds solid facts to highly speculative fiction, while adding to the author's and readers' fun. Olivas, a Pasadena resident, locates action around the city's Norton Simon Museum, Vroman's bookstore, the lovers plan take-out from Urbano Mexican Kitchen, the man's habitual run takes him along Hurlburt Avenue to Pasadena Avenue. 

 

Chicano Frankenstein is speculative fiction that speaks for itself. I see no profit in finding metaphoric correspondence triangulating issues involving immigrants and LGBTQ+ gente, with the fiction of reanimated people. It spoils the fun to look too closely, despite the publisher's blurb that here's a "retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic that addresses issues of belonging and assimilation". 

There is a serious point about voting, however. The dead can vote and swing elections. That's the metaphor. The argument emerges, if the power hates you, take their power from them.

 

Daniel A. Olivas has a lot of fun with his story, explaining just enough for the willing suspension of disbelief that's necessary to savor fully Olivas the satirist's come-uppance to the conniving president. If it were summer I'd say this is a classic beach read, but it's Spring, a season of renewal, for reanimation. Sounds like a perfect season for reading Chicano Frankenstein.

 

Olivas is on book tour right now. He spoke to a packed house at Vroman's books alongside interviewer Desirée Zamorano, and Olivas will be in Portland soon. Check the author's website (link) for details.

 

Author Desirée Zamorano (link) holds the book about the man
who is Chicano but not Frankenstein.