Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus first appeared anonymously in 1818, in three volumes, and this is that original text, before Mary Shelley's 1831 revision. She began it at eighteen, during a rainy summer near Geneva when Byron proposed a ghost-story contest. An Arctic explorer writes home about a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who built a living creature and fled from it; at the centre the creature speaks for himself, having learned language by spying on a family of cottagers.
This is demanding literary Vietnamese, with over a third of sentences past thirty syllables. Four letters lead into chapters of 2,600 to 5,800 syllables, then a final one of 13,200. Volume I, Chapter III, on Victor's studies, is densest. The xưng hô carries the drama: the creature pleads as tôi and calls his maker ngài, while Victor answers with ta and mi. Once Victor destroys the unfinished mate, the creature takes ta and ngươi for himself.
