Customer Reviews

The House of the Seven Gables (Enriched Classics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read the House of the Seven Gables about thirty five years ago. I enjoyed the book then and I enjoyed rereading it. Nathaniel Hawthorne has a way of turning a phrase. There are portions of the book that I have reread several times. I would recommend this book to anyone that loves to read the classics. Hawthorne details scenes and emotion in a brisk, but complex way. I felt, sometimes, I was living in New England. As a classic, House is very readable. I try not to analyze, to deeply, all of the reasons a writer chooses how to handle a subject. Mid-nineteenth century literature can be a joy to read, it rewards one with a tangible sense of history. If you enjoy reading House, try The Scarlet Letter.

The story, Hawthorne's second, is a romantic mystery that takes place in a battered seven gable house in a small New England town. It begins with a complicated and top-heavy backdrop. At its center is the socially prominent Pyncheon family. The Pyncheons are a family that holds many dark, mysterious and often deadly secrets -- not the least of them being that 150 years earlier, the land on which the house of the seven gables was built, was actually swindled away from its rightful owner, Matthew Maude, by the locally prominent Colonel Jaffery Pyncheon. After the "good colonel" had swindled away the land, he then promptly (and conveniently) proceeded to have Maude executed for practicing witchcraft - an easy charge for a prominent citizen to level against someone of lesser status at the time. However, from the scaffold, Maude placed a curse on the entire Pyncheon family, and the plot of the story is launched. The rest of the story is primarily about both the unfolding of the deadly secrets of the Pyncheon family, and the effects of the curse that Maude had placed upon them, get played out.

Colonel Pyncheon was so unfazed by the promised curse that he brazenly hired to build (on the land he had just swindled from his father) Maude's son as his carpenter. Well, he "shouldn't have oughta" done that because true to the curse, at the house warming the "good Colonel" is found dead sitting at his desk. To add more intrigue to an already galloping mystery, the Colonel had also left a will with directions to a deed for a giant tract of land somewhere in Maine.

With this dense backdrop the prologue ends and sets up a complicated pretext for the second act of the story, which begins with Hepzibah, an old maid and one of the few remaining heirs to the now dwindling Pyncheon fortune as she opens up a penny store on the ground floor of the house of the seven gables. Finally waking up to her diminished social condition, becoming a shop operator was her last resort way of trying to "make ends meet."

The rest of the story and its intertwined intrigues, unfold within the store and with the tenants of the house being at its center. The Maude's curse continues to bring bad luck to the Pyncheon household, culminating in Jaffery Pyncheon II's alleged murder by his young nephew, Clifford. After spending 30 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, Clifford, the last of the Pyncheons still possessing first hand knowledge of the complicated set of family secrets, returns to the house, to be cared for by his elder sister.

Everyone thinks Clifford knows where the deed is, including his uncle who stalks the returned prisoner for his hidden secrets. But the deed is never found and the uncle, like his father, is found dead sitting at the same desk as his dead father was found. Hepzibah and Clifford abandon the house for a time but return in time for Phoebe and Hargrove (a photographer and tenant), to wed. This wedding appeared to be the cathartic medicine needed to rid the house of its evil spirits. Yet, Phoebe and her new husband chose to move the family away from the cursed home, and they (apparently) lived happily ever afterwards.

The moral of the story is that the sins of one generation can live on to infect subsequent generations. Or said differently, the sins of the father will always revisit the sons of subsequent generations. This was a much too long and too complicated and illogical novel for my taste. Three stars

Reading this novel, it is somewhat funny to call to one's mind how the roots of Puritanism turned into the other extreme during the last centuries, how US-American culture became a symbolism for innovation, eternal change, destruction of everything only slightly old or conservative, endlessly impatient, dissatisfied, always convinced that the next step must necessarily be better than the last one. Traditions overturned, buildings torn down one after the other, entire cities redesigned, customs overthrown, technical innovations overlapping one another in an endless chase for perfection, that's what it stands for now - the country where once the Puritans emigrated to searching for a pure spot of untouched nature where their children were supposed to grow up unspoilt.

The house of the seven gables is a mansion built by an archetype of a Puritan and inhabited by his descendants ever since, and nothing but sadness and depression seem to inhabit it and to affect whoever lives there. The daguerreotypist, last descendant of the original owner of the land the house stands on, whose family was forced into poverty after having been tricked away from its ownership, some time in the novel has a long and enthusiastic speech declaring how useless it is to keep a building up for more than twenty years; the son of the house, now in his sixties, is even more enthusiastic about change, calling every kind of building not a home and refuge but a place where life is suffocated, and loving how travelling by railroad - a method of transport which was very modern about the middle of the 19th century, when the novel takes place - makes a human being speed from one place to another, never resting. Likewise, how much does the author enjoy to emphasize again and again the age, ugliness, futility, incapacity of doing anything good in this world, of this man's elderly sister, and repeating again and again the loveliness and freshness of the - of course seventeen-year-old - country niece.

Despise for every kind of tradition, for age and dignity, for experience, for the past, that is what this novel is all about. The small concession at the end, where in a few sentences it is said that perhaps the best solution is to keep a house as it was on the outside, and to refurnish it again with every generation so it will suit to it, is drowned by the countless words which have incessantly crucified throughout the novel anything that has to do with age and tradition. The reader's impression is that not the dishonesty by which the builder of the house got hold on its territory is the reason for the "curse" haunting the family, but the very fact that it is old, decaying, and thus not worth anything in the first place.

It is likewise interesting to see how this selfsame novel, while so intent on saying how desirable solely youth and novelty are, is dull and somewhat dusty to the today's reader. Very little happens, and the descriptions between the few things that happen are, though well-written, extremely long and make it all the clearer that not the plot, but the "moral" of the novel is what the author is after; it is called a "gothic novel" without having any suspense or mystic trait in it despite the ever-reoccurring hints about (perfectly harmless) ghosts hanging around the house and "mysterious things" going about. I can hardly recommend this novel, unless a) You want to learn a little about the style of life of a small US city in the 19th century (very little, since almost everything takes place in and about the house and we learn quite little about the city itself), or b) You are interested in philosophy respectively politics and want to analyze where today's US-American mentality came from, with its constant, almost frantic need for destruction of old things and love for new ones that will, this time, certainly be better; blind in the search for treasures, neither willing nor capable to separate the things that indeed must be changed from the ones that, though old, are good and immortally valuable, convinced that as soon as something is new - that is, newly discovered - it must, invariably, be "it".

Other than a few sarcastic smiles, this novel has wrought nothing from me and I would never recommend it to the average reader who wants not only to be lectured, but also to be, at least a little, entertained and involved into an interesting story with credible, live characters. This book's setting, characters and plot are so grey and vacuous and have so little of a real classic in them, which would be a book that one can read and love years, decades or centuries after it was written, that it has deservedly fallen, for today's reader, almost completely into oblivion.

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne is set in the early times of this country and Hawthorne uses his vivid word choice to describe every little piece of what is going on. This can get quite boring at times because of the dry reading that is made from it. One example of this is where he goes on for over ten pages of describing every detail of the Pyncheon garden. After awhile of this descriptive word choice and very little dialogue, the book starts to become very dry. At certain points of the novel it becomes very hard to read and understand what is going on. What saves this book is the very intense story line that is going on in this book. The main story line is revenge and greed. The difference in the characters in this book of being nice and kind and then other characters that are evil are greedy provide foils for this book. This helps the readers define that people are either good or evil and the differences between the two are quite large. This makes readers interested because it makes the characters relatable and the readers woot for good to triumph over evil.

The reason i gave this book 3 stars is that my opinion is split on if I liked the book or not. I loved the story line and how the plot unfolded. The characters were well written and the plot was very well thought out and executed perfectly. The thing that I did not like is that some points were just described too much. At points it was hard to understand the plot and the characters with all the verbage that Hawthorne uses. He intertwined describing and the plot line together and at some parts it was hard to keep everything in check. Overall this was a good book except for the wordage that Hawthorne uses but that is typical for his work. I would recommend this book to other readers.

This beautifully written book reads slowly, because the complex sentences & original thoughts require time to digest & enjoy. So, I choose my reading time carefully, when I'll stay alert & concentrate enough to get it the first time.

The only thing I don't like about the book is the print. You have to concentrate when you read this book, but it is a good book.

Hawthorne's work is a creepy classic -- one of the most interesting books to emerge from an entirely different era of American letters.

I just love Nathaniel Hawthorne, he is brilliant and is a master at creating a mood.