Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. rating: 4

I wonder at myself: why did I start the habit of using a ratings system for what I read? it is quite random at times what I rate a book---especially the first time I read a certain one. subsequent rereads tend to give a more accurate feeling for me.

and how can I rate one writing style or genre against another? well, I can't... I can't directly compare a novel published in 1847 with one published in 2007... I can only say "I think this is great stuff" and give it a 4.

Wuthering Heights may well deserve a 5; if I still think so in a year or a decade, after subsequent rereads, then it is true. but I will hedge a bit and say 4 for now, because I tend to be over enthusiastic right after reading.

Wuthering Heights has a bit of a ghost story around the campfire feel to me. I read it all in two sittings, and I would have read it in one if the real world would just have left me to it! the people or culture or SOMETHING about that time period fascinates me... in part because it seems to me that everyone is so capricious with their emotions. love is vowed to be utter and for ever, and everything is a flurry of kisses and eponyms, that is, until the other smiles in a funny way or misunderstands a word and then the heart is cold and dead to the world. people are outrageously angry and then suddenly laugh it all away; people are amazingly cruel but then call you naughty for not being fond of them. it amazes me. they seem particularly detached about suffering. I guess they are surrounded by it. if a person is crying out in pain, they complain about the noise and then shut them off in a room alone. same with their own baby or mother as any stranger. other people's pains seem an inconvenience to them, as if there were no connection whatsoever on a human level. they'll smack a kid til he's bleeding out of the ears and permanently brain damaged, and then blame the kid forever more about the consequences.

not quite charming by my standards, so I find it hard to be really drawn into any love story in such a setting.

somebody told me this was about the love between Catherine and Heathcliff and how that love destroyed themselves and everyone around them... but love seemed to have very little to do with it. cruelty and revenge for said cruelty seems to bulk of it. obsession, on Heathcliff's part, but hardly love. one wonders what they meant by Love at all.

that said, the way Emily Bronte told the story is quite creative and well-done. I wanted to find out what happened even when I was completely dispossessed of any real feelings for the characters: I had to find out how the plot concluded and how it was revealed.

a fine story!

also of course I am a linguaphile, and I loved seeing some "new" words and different usages of familiar ones. I love it when she wrote that the rain "plashed". it didn't splash, it plashed. I get a little chill on such encounters. and then names! I'm so odd lol. and then of course, Emily Bronte is a quite talented wordsmith:

He was, and is yet most likely, the most wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbors. (p. 296 of the omnibus Charlotte and Emily Bronte: the complete novels)