Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934)

Did you know that Nathaniel Hawthorne's son was a writer of pulp fiction? I did not! Although, calling this story pulp fiction is significantly underselling it. It's one of the most beautiful depictions of an encounter with a femme fatale I've read, and is a credit to the Irish folklore that inspired it.

Two friends meet after one returns from a sojourn abroad. The banjo that one gifted to the other in now inexplicably aged and worn - looking more like something from the Middle Ages than a show more newly-crafted instrument. In explanation, the friend tells a strange tale of being lost in the Irish countryside, and of an encounter with a friendly and welcoming young woman whom he meets by the grave of a lady who died tragically two hundred years ago. show less

Did you know that Nathaniel Hawthorne's son was a writer of pulp fiction? I did not! Although, calling this story pulp fiction is significantly underselling it. It's one of the most beautiful depictions of an encounter with a femme fatale I've read, and is a credit to the Irish folklore that inspired it.

Two friends meet after one returns from a sojourn abroad. The banjo that one gifted to the other in now inexplicably aged and worn - looking more like something from the Middle Ages than a show more newly-crafted instrument. In explanation, the friend tells a strange tale of being lost in the Irish countryside, and of an encounter with a friendly and welcoming young woman whom he meets by the grave of a lady who died tragically two hundred years ago. show less

A short read - beautiful primarily because I was in the rare books room of the Chicago Public Library, which - if you haven't gone there - hie yourself to one of the most beautiful rooms in the city.

Full of the requisite racism and sexism of the era, and with an odd little aside for most of the middle portion of the book on a winsome young lady named Hildegarde, this book was useful for what I needed it for (despite Hawthorne's own claim that "a sustained effort has been made to divest its show more pages of anything that could be construed as useful information") and made for an enjoyable few hours. show less

A pretty mixed bag. The Lawrence Sterne story was surprisingly weak, the Dickens surprisingly strong.

The version of Melmoth included here is clearly truncated (like those "condensed" books), and may have been the one I was exposed to back in the day. The original is often described as interminable, and clocks in at over 600 pages - double the length of this volume!

So I will still be giving that a go, as an interminable volume of constantly-interrupted nested narratives by possibly show more unreliable narrators is just the sort of grueling entertainment I like to set for myself. show less