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Liked It “This review contains spoilers. |
Didn’t Like It “I bought this book last summer when in Salem after our visit to the House of Seven Gables. I enjoyed the tour and loved the piece of property. Unfortunately I expected that since this book has been such a classic it would be interesting. I was wrong. The writing is wordy, to the point of...” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“classic hawthorne. ”
Branwell's Books wrote this review 3 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I bought this book last summer when in Salem after our visit to the House of Seven Gables. I enjoyed the tour and loved the piece of property. Unfortunately I expected that since this book has been such a classic it would be interesting. I was wrong. The writing is wordy, to the point of boring the reader. It would take a few pages just to describe a meal or the weather of the day. The storyline itself was slightly interesting but woven into all the unnecessary details made it dull. The only redeeming part for me was the reminder of my visit to this historic landmark. But if a reader had never been there they would have no redeeming part to the story.”
TJ H wrote this review Friday, May 4, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Lexile: 930”
Mrs. Hunt wrote this review Thursday, March 22, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“This review contains spoilers.
John David wrote this review Friday, March 16, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
I have a vague memory of reading “The Scarlet Letter” sometime in middle school, and coming away feeling like you would expect after you’d read a novel about Puritan repression (that’s all I thought it was about at the time). “The House of the Seven Gables” was like finding a Hawthorne I’d never known before – one of ghosts, the eternal return of historical memory, and high Gothic romance. This time, it reminded me more of Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis than it did the cold Puritanism that I once associated with Hester Prynne. In this sense, it stood up to what Hawthorne identified most of his longer fiction as, that is, “romance.”
In the late seventeenth century, the eponymous house (actually inspired by an historical 1688 colonial mansion in Salem) served as the residence of Colonel Pyncheon, who once accused a man named Matthew Maule of sorcery in order to have him hanged, and then stole the land upon which he would eventually build his house. One day, the Colonel keels over at his desk under mysterious circumstances, but his presence and his nefariousness seem to haunt the Pyncheon house in various ways.
Several generations later, Hepzibah and her intellectually challenged brother Clifford come to occupy the house. They are both descendants of the Colonel, but now the family fortune and good reputation have withered away so much that Hepzibah has to open a store in her house to make some extra money, and thinks herself an abject failure because of it. Holgrave, a daguerrotypist, rents a room from Hepzibah upstairs. One day, a distant relation to both Clifford and Hepzibah named Phoebe Pyncheon visits and manages to quickly change the whole tenor of the house: she is able to bring vim and vigor to the Hepzibah’s failing penny shop, and she gives Clifford the companionship and attention that he needs. Just as soon as she appears, however, she leaves again and the house falls into its former dilapidated state.
Judge Pyncheon, another member of the family and a wealthy man about town with an eminent reputation, appears at Hepzibah’s house and announces that he wants to institutionalize Clifford. The Judge claims that Clifford knows the whereabouts of certain documents that will allow him access to vast tracts of land in Maine. While waiting to talk to Clifford, the Judge dies in much the same way that the Colonel did so many generations before. Hepzibah and Clifford head to a train station to leave their outre circumstances. Later, Phoebe returns to the house with only the artist Holgrave in residence, and he admits how he has (admittedly, somewhat predictably) always loved her. Hepzibah and Clifford soon return to live there, with Phoebe having inherited all of the Judge’s ill-gotten land. Holgrave proclaims that he is himself a distant relative of Matthew Maule, so long ago accused of conjury. The House of Seven Gables, so long riven by tumult and strife, is finally exorcised by that ultimate mage, love.
I read this mostly as a meditation on the transgressions of history and our inevitable tendency to bear them witness no matter how far removed in time we are from them, two of Hawthorne’s pet concerns. Indeed, it’s interesting how the sins of Colonel Pyncheon seem almost to take place in a prelapsarian past while at the same time having such a profound effect on the characters presently at hand. Hawthorne wonderfully blends the oppressiveness of the past with the stark newness of the present throughout the novel: the figures of the Salem witch trials (one of whom was Judge John Hathorne, Nathaniel’s great-great-grandfather, who found many of the “witches” guilty) haunt the novel in spirit, but so do all kinds of (then) modern technologies, from Holgrave’s daguerreotype, to the train that Hepzibah and Clifford use to escape the ghosts of their pasts. Published in 1851 and with the possibility of freedom from the past being central to the novel, Hawthorne might have meant for this to be, at least in some respects, a commentary on the coming Civil War. As Faulkner, another American equally concerned with the onus of history said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
I enjoyed it so much I immediately picked up “The Blithedale Romance,” a review of which will be posted soon.
”“The book is full of twist and turns that deal with the family curse and mystery of the family's missing land.”
Kelsey Bak wrote this review Tuesday, February 28, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Great story, well thought out and the narration flows beautifully. Clever in the devices used, especially the chapters describing Judge Pyncheon's death.
Ria K wrote this review Saturday, February 25, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Part lovel story and part gothic melodrama. ”“Another great classic”
Eileen Carpenter wrote this review Tuesday, February 21, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Linda E said: 1 star
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die Shelf wrote this review Monday, January 30, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The only part of this book I found interesting, was Hepzibah Pyncheon setting up and running her little shop. The rest of the story was so muddled, and the characters and situations so absurd, it just wasn’t entertaining. Then, to crown it off, Hawthorne tortures the reader with the endless death of Judge Pyncheon.”
“Forgot what it is like to read a classic.”
Andrea B wrote this review Friday, January 20, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“What a boring book. Nothing really happens in the whole book. Hepzibah Pyncheon opens a shop, her cousing Phoebe comes to live with her and then her brother Clifford returns home and they all hate Judge Pyncheon. I could care less about any of the characters and have no idea why this is one the 1001 books to read before you die list.”
Rachel H wrote this review Wednesday, January 18, 2012. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
