sethcrumrine 's review for:

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

5.0

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All I can say is wow! By far my favorite thing I have read so far in 2024. At times frightening, sad, gorgeous, bewildering, pensive, touching, subtly hilarious...its a romantic novel in the truest sense. Although Hawthorne uses his characters to flesh out his theories and ideas on such things as death, art, and beauty, we never lose sight of them as full-blooded participants within the narrative. He truly cares about them. The greatest character of them all is the Seven-Gabled manse. It undulates and creaks with all generations of the Pyncheon lineage, and holds them hostage in their own sort of limbo. The characters who are supposed to be alive in the story feel at times as if they are dead, and vice versa. Hawthorne manufactures a tear in the fabric between the land of the living and the dead, and the House is the conduit. And his turns of phrase! The dude can turn what seems like five minutes of exposition into a philosophical treatise, and I never tired of it. I have to seek out some of his other work. So good.