Marble Faun
Four Americans wander through the sun-drenched ruins of Rome, their innocence slowly curdling into something darker. Hawthorne's final and most unsettling romance follows Miriam, the mysterious painter whose beauty echoes Judith and Cleopatra; pure Hilda, who spends her days copying Renaissance masterpieces in Vatican galleries; Kenyon, the rational sculptor; and Donatello, the strange, animalistic count who bears the face of Praxiteles' faun. When a crime shatters their small circle, each must reckon with guilt, desire, and the gap between the ancient world they inhabit and the modern souls trapped within it. Written on the eve of the Civil War, this is Hawthorne's most sensual and ambiguous work, a Gothic fever dream where innocence is always already lost, and salvation remains eternally out of reach.
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grayeul, Lars Rolander (1942-2016), Amy Gramour, Terry Goodyer +2 more
