The 3 best books by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Being romantic supposes melancholy, disenchantment and uprooting. Being also a romantic writer should be seen as a brilliant form of rebellion in form, as an escape from the prosaic world. dressing that same prose with ornament and tinsel, making a first aesthetic concession that can end up awakening intense contrasts with stark reality.

And in that extension of romanticism towards dark aesthetics, towards gothic, the good of nathaniel hawthorne, one of those brilliant guys who could have thrived in spheres of power, who even rubbed shoulders with the taciturn Yankee president Franklin Pierce, whose political journey was always marked by the death of his son and the almost ghostly seclusion of his wife.

But being a writer always entails a point of renouncing the farce, at least for those who intend to become an authentic book writer, those who write the soul, as I would say. Atahualpa Yupanqui.

His fondness for the dark may have some telluric force. It must be remembered that this nineteenth-century writer spent much of his youth in the state of Maine, where the great Stephen King would end up staging much of his dark novels of our day.

Hawthorne was widely recognized for his short stories, but he also composed great novels that have survived to this day with a greater taste for authenticity and with worldwide recognition. Nothing better than a writer who enters the mists of his times to captivate us with the only thing we have left, the imaginary of a bygone era ...

Top 3 best books by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The scarlet letter

Being the nineteenth century a time of contrasts between puritanism and freedom of conscience that was gaining space in all social classes, this novel was presented as a hymn to freedom in a United States where it tried to recover a retrograde morality, shamelessly devolving .

Hester Prynne is one of those female characters who certainly serve the cause of liberation, of feminism, a question that, reflected by a male author of the time, takes on special relevance in a struggle that should always have been joint.

In front of the adulterous, vilifiable, hateful woman in the eyes of formal society, the image of the liberated woman emerges, ahead of her time. If she is not the one fighting for her space, no one will. The characters of the Reverend Dimmesdale or Chillingworth do nothing but show the conflict in which the society of their time moved.

A novel with those dark tints that the author liked to develop in his most Gothic work but that, nevertheless, ends up descending to the depths of various aspects such as social conflicts, guilt, repentance, anguish, passions, morality, religion and the contradictions that have always accompanied reason.

The house of the seven roofs

The truth is that it is not easy to choose between the previous novel and this one. Although the first has that verve of the rebellious, of the intention of revenge in the face of cruelty, in this second case it is the birth of telluric terror, of the earth as a place where curses and sinister visits from the beyond can take root.

We visit the town of Salem (it looks like the Salem's Lot was founded here Stephen King). It is the seventeenth century and Colonel Pyncheon decides to build a large posh house that ends up differentiating him as the great man of the place that he is. The place where he will make his home is in the old house of Mathew Maule, recently condemned as a witch.

Without a doubt it is a gesture of sufficiency and power. The problem is that for a "maldead" being like the aforementioned Maule, the decision becomes the best opportunity to fulfill all his curses on the one who governed his execution, and on his children or any descendant who may bear his surname ...

Wakefield

You cannot omit the dedication to the story of this author, consolidated over time as one of the greatest storytellers. Almost all his readers point to Wakefield's tale as his best short composition.

The darkness in the setting accompanies the darkness in the decisions of this imperishable character. Wakefield allegorically personifies everything that involves deciding in life. And seen from the outside, decisions don't always seem right.

But we know little about the inner mechanism that moves Wakefield, until the author brings us up to date on the fundamentals of his decisions.

This story or tale is usually accompanied by others to close commemorative volumes that bring us closer to that masterful dedication in the short term.