WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte
★★☆☆☆
originally published in 1847
I knew before I started Wuthering Heights that it tends to be one of those quintessential love-it-or-hate-it books, but I was fairly confident that I would love it. The complaints I’d seen leveled against it – dense prose, unlikable characters – are things I find myself often defending. As you can see, this did not go as expected.
The prose wasn’t just dense; it was clunky, awkward, and every sentence seemed to be crafted for the sheer purpose of deliberate obfuscation. Reading this book felt like walking through brambles that haven’t been trimmed, I’m not sure how else to describe it.
The characters weren’t just unlikable; they were loathsome, and (in my opinion) utterly one-dimensional. Heathcliff and Catherine are jealous, spiteful, and cruel, and… that’s it. Several hundred pages follow of them being jealous, spiteful, and cruel to one another. To clarify: my problem with this book isn’t that I didn’t find their relationship romantic – that’s the last thing I care about in a novel, really. I had been looking forward into digging into this iconic fictional relationship and finding myself fascinated and compelled by the dynamic. Suffice to say, I was neither fascinated nor compelled. I was bored.
My third problem with Wuthering Heights was the narration. It begins from the point of view of Lockwood, the most unutterably pointless character in the history of literature, and a few chapters in, Nelly begins to tell Lockwood the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. So you’ll have a direct quote from Heathcliff, which is being narrated by Nelly, which is then recorded for our supreme reading pleasure by Lockwood. And the thing is, there is nothing to distinguish Lockwood and Nelly’s narration. The narrative voices of a well-to-do gentleman and a housemaid should not be identical. It was also frustrating, the fact that everything was recounted secondhand. First person minor is probably my least favorite point of view of all time (I have similarly negative feelings about The Great Gatsby), so I am fully aware that this is mostly my own bias, but I don’t fully understand the point of crafting such a passionate and volatile tale only to keep your reader at arm’s length from it.
Sorry, Emily, I think I shall stick with Charlotte from now on.
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life is the book I want to write. I mean, not literally, because Hanya already did it, but the incisive and thoughtful quality of her prose is exactly what I strive for in my own writing; there’s such an effortless quality to it that I admire so much more than overly flowery prose. Her characters are nuanced and multidimensional; her story is utterly devastating… all of the elements that come together and make A Little Life extraordinary are things I hope to achieve with a book some day.
Donna Tartt: Okay, maybe I lied – if there’s any book I wish I could have authored more than A Little Life, it’s The Secret History. I mean… I live in Vermont and it’s the setting I’m most comfortable writing, and I have a huge interest in the classics, and I love academia-based narratives, and I love literary thrillers… but Tartt got there first, alas. But I’m not mad because I think she is such a tremendous talent. I know that some people think her prose is pretentious, but I find it absolutely mesmerizing. If I can write a paragraph half this good in my lifetime I will be very happy.
John Boyne: The aspect of Boyne’s style that I admire so much is his ability to flit back and forth between gravity and levity – The Heart’s Invisible Furies is the only book I can think of that made me actually laugh out loud, and cry on different occasions. Sometimes I think I should write a book as unapologetically dark as the two I mentioned above, but then sometimes I think I should try my hand at dark humor, and Boyne would be the model I would turn to in that case. I mean, even The Absolutist, as depressing as it was, had some unexpectedly comedic moments. Although I usually think I’d rather make readers cry than laugh, I think doing both would actually be ideal.
Hannah Kent: Kent’s prose is superb. Burial Rites is one of the most atmospheric novels I’ve ever read – I would love to write a book like this where prose and setting and characters all come together to create something so striking and devastating.
John Steinbeck: Okay, so, I used to think I hated Steinbeck. I couldn’t stand The Grapes of Wrath or The Pearl, and I was very surprised when I enjoyed Of Mice and Men but quickly wrote it off as a random blip – so no one was more surprised than I was when I fell so in love with East of Eden earlier this year. So when I say I want to write like Steinbeck, I mean, I want to write like Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. Everything about that novel’s construction is a masterpiece. (I can’t take Steinbeck haters who haven’t read East of Eden seriously. I mean. Give it a chance.)
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. Let’s just get the Greek mythology one out of the way since you knew it was coming. I so wanted to love this book, which is supposedly a feminist retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, with a focus on Odysseus’s execution of Penelope’s maids, but so much of it rubbed me the wrong way. The treatment of every female character other than Penelope was pretty abhorrent – I struggled to find the feminist merit in a book that reclaimed one female perspective, only to demonize all of the other female characters. I’m also a BIG Helen of Sparta fan, so any Trojan War retelling which places the blame for the war on Helen (as this one did) irritates me to no end. Basically, I’d love to rewrite this, keeping Atwood’s characterization of Penelope and the maids, but pretty much reworking the way all of the other female characters are treated by the narrative.
The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox. This is a sort of tender gay romance between a man and an angel who can only meet on one day of the year, set in early 1800s France. I was so sure that I was going to love this book that I would have confidently included it in one of those ‘five-star read predictions’ posts that I did yesterday, but it ended up barely scraping by with two stars. I just thought the execution was so messy. There were so many background characters and subplots which ended up being ultimately inconsequential, and the extreme unlikability of the protagonist made it sort of difficult to root for the romance. I’m obsessed with this premise though; I would love to keep the format of the book (each chapter taking place in the consecutive year) and cut out a lot of the filler material.
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. This is another book with a fascinating premise. It’s set in World War II London (nothing unusual there) – but it’s told going backwards in time; so the novel begins in 1945 (or ’46… somewhere in there) and ends in 1941. The problem with this book? It’s only about 5 chapters, and each one is so long. So basically, we’re in the 1945 narrative… and it keeps going for a hundred pages – now WAIT, STOP, we’re traveling back in time to 1944. And then the 1944 narrative moves forward for a hundred pages – now WAIT, back another year. Etc. It felt so disjointed to spend so much time in a certain year only to be jerked backward somewhat arbitrarily. I think I would have made different use of the backwards timeline if I’d written this novel… and it’s frustrating, because there’s so much to love, including a great host of LGBT characters.
Mischling by Affinity Konar. I either want to rewrite this book or just stop it from existing tbh…. I found this so, so, so offensive. It’s another WWII novel, this time about a fictional set of twins who were the subject of one of 
The Girls by Emma Cline. This one seems timely with the death of Charles Manson yesterday. I admit to being morbidly fascinated by cults, so I’d been excited to pick up The Girls, 2016’s ‘it book’ of the summer about a young girl who joins a Mason-esque cult in the 1970s. But man, did I not like the execution. First of all, I thought the prose was terrible, and second of all, what frustrated me the most was how the protagonist (and therefore, the reader) was held at an arm’s length from most of the action of the story. Evie was always on the sidelines of the group and never really a true part of it, so I sort of felt like… what’s the point? I hadn’t learned anything about the psychology of what drives a person to join a cult other than what I already knew, which was not a whole lot to begin with. For how little research was in here, I was shocked at this book’s rumored 2 million dollar price tag. I’d love the chance to rewrite this story and really delve into the subject in a way that Cline hadn’t.
pace, amore, libri 