What book are you reading, ιf' - Iff you read books

[Bonyduck Campersang]

So I am now reading The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is good so far, but the constant third-person narrator's personal commentary is putting me off. It is charming when Dickens does it, but then Dickens is a master of his craft, and he knew when to time them so as to not break the flow, and at least he waited until we were familiar with the character so as for the commentary to have a greater impact. Not so Hawthorne. I just hope I'm able to finish this book instead of bailing out this time too.

Really wish he'd nix the commentary and get on with the story

Spoiler :

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example, can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction—but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl. And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

 

[Kaitzilla]

How can we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce—not a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction—but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl. And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way

Have mercy on the bread lady!

This must be an old classic.
Old classics really like to mix in philosophy with their adjectives.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

This must be an old classic.
Old classics really like to mix in philosophy with their adjectives.

I like old classics! I love Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins! I like a story to be long and meandering, as long as it's a story worth telling. But this one isn't it. You can't start philosophising before the story has even begun. The reader doesn't even know this character, she hasn't even spoken a single word, the narrator's ruminations fall flat because the reader is not in a position to connect with the character. This to me is bad writing