The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni (Penguin Classics) (original 1860; edition 1990)

Is it possible to give 0 stars and not have others think you forget to rate the book? This was the worst Hawthorne book that I have ever read. ( )

The nowadays English title sometimes is «The Romance of Monte Beni ». Hawthorne made me curious to travel to Italy. I could not afford to stay there a year like him, but in a couple of weeks, being twenty-four and in love, I caught a lot of the heart-rending beauty of this country.

As a mystery, this is a bit of a dud. As a psychological novel, it's not much better (while the characters grapple with some interesting questions/problems, they still feel a bit cardboardy).

But it is an interesting meditation on the ambiguities of apparently clear-cut categories like civilization, art, morality, purity, etc. And the descriptions of Rome are wonderful, as is the loving satire of the mid-nineteenth-century American art scene there.

Parts of it I give five stars (there is some really spectacular stuff here), but other parts were a torture to slog through (particularly the stagnant middle section with its unaccountable focus on the insipid Hilda). Might actually have worked better as a nonfiction travel book on contemporary Rome, but he must have needed to pad it out with a dose of melodrama to attract readers. ( )

816 The Marble Faun or The Romance of Monti Beni, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (read 18 Aug 1965) I was not moved to make any comment on this novel after I finished it. I still remember it as a fairly interesting book, though not one that excited me. You can read the Wikipedia article on the book here:
The Marble Faun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ( )

LIked it enough, but I still don't get what the real identity of Miriam was (Howthorne makes several allusions to someone attatched to an important, or at least infamous, historical event). Anyone get it?