Reviews for The Marble Faun

The average rating for The Marble Faun based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-28 00:00:00 Nathan Kelly The Marble Faun was an exhausting read, as emblematic perhaps as the weighty themes within the novel itself: an exploration of nature versus artifice, good versus evil, Old World Dogma versus New World Morality, Roman Catholicism versus New England Puritanism. Each thesis is explored closely, minutely, intimately: and each becomes a hand-to-hand combat for supremacy over the reader's soul. I'm not convinced that Hawthorne offered resolution to the topics addressed, but participating in the argument was the beginning of a cleansing fire. Everything is thrown at the reader under the guise of a gothic romance, which, in the end is its weakest motif. It rests behind the larger questions like a wallpaper, moving in tandem with the characters and the themes, but blending in the background like nondescript decor. It is such a weak presence, in fact, that Hawthorne even "forgets" to bring resolution to it and offers it, in an epilogue, a bit too neatly, all tied in a pretty ribbon. Had this been done by a lesser author, it would have failed miserably; in Hawthorne, it is easily forgiven, as if the reader too has determined that it's the least important of all the themes. Who really cares about the murder and The Model, in the end, when one is being offered spiritual illumination? (A glib analysis, perhaps, but arguably that was his intent when he penned this book, for finding a "healhty" spirituality had haunted Hawthorne like a bugbear all his life, and his works are laden with it.) These themes, these questions are as old as man himself. And, in every generation, the prophets, the wizards, the magi, the visionaries, the soothsayers, the philosophers ... rise up and debate the questions again -- as if those questions were all newly hatched. Sometimes it's a sham; and sometimes, as in this case, it's a privilege to dance in the mind of a long-dead philosopher and explore his own version of the songs of innocence and experience, for The Marble Faun is as close as one can come, in prose, to exploring the "mind forg'd manacles" that Blake drew out in rhyme.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-09 00:00:00 Christen Caos I've just, finally, finished reading "The Marble Faun" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I now have some conception of what it feels like to have run a marathon dressed in full deep-sea diving gear. Zeus, what a tedious, turgid, overblown book. I chose it because it was listed in a book called "1001 books to read before you die" - but perhaps I misread the title and it was actually "1001 books that are only marginally better than actually being dead". The style is thick and clotted, the plot lacking in momentum, and the characters unreal and uncongenial. The most bizarre thing about the book, however, was the series of parallels with Donna Tartt's "The Secret History". In the first half of "The Secret History" a group of reclusive students studying Greek in New England, including one who is at the edge of the group and not quite accepted by them, commit a murder in a fit of Bacchanalian madness by throwing a man off a cliff; and in the second half the aftermath affects their relationships and their mental health. In the first half of "The Marble Faun", a group of New England artists practising their studies in Rome, along with a rural Italian count who appears half man and half faun, commit a murder of someone who has been following one of their number by throwing him off the Tarpeian Rock; and in the second half the aftermath affects their relationships and their mental health. The book doesn't have a clear conclusion - so much so, in fact, that the author was compelled to add a four page postscript explaining some of the elements of the book that were left uncertain. It's all totally unsatisfying: and if it weren't for my dogged, never-say-die approach to reading books I'd never have completed it. Still, as the Calvinist said after he'd fallen down the stairs, at least that's over.