In the Library
The Marble Faun
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 52
- Length
- Length 140k words
£1.99
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The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!
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If you like this, try
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Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Paradise Lost
John Milton
The poem Miriam is quoting when she asks whether the Fall was worth it, and the reason her question is heresy rather than idle talk.
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The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
James takes a bright American innocent to Rome, among the same galleries and ruins, and lets her discover what an old world hides behind its beauty.
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About the book
In a sculpture gallery on the Capitol, three friends notice that the young Italian count standing with them is the exact double of the Faun of Praxiteles, down to the sleepy sweetness of the mouth. They tease him about the ears. He will not let anyone lift his curls. Donatello is happiness with no self-consciousness anywhere in it, and Hawthorne spends half the book showing you precisely what that is worth so that the other half can take it away. On the edge of the Tarpeian Rock he holds a man out over the drop and looks at the woman he loves, and she does not say no with her eyes, and afterwards he has a soul. This is the book in which Hawthorne asks out loud whether the Fall was the making of the human race, and then refuses to answer. He wrote it in Rome, finished it in England, and never completed another.