Wuthering Heights

Rating:
Summary: An amazing love story
Review: Wuthering Heights is the classical novel dealing with undying love and loss. Set on the moors of mid-nineteenth century England it tells the story of a love between the orphan boy Heathcliffe and Katherine. Katherine and Heathcliffe fall madly in love with each other, but there love is not to be as both end up marrying other people. However, their love for each other continues even after their marriages and after their deaths. This is a love that cannot be stopped by death and endures forever.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte wrote of one the classic novels of the nineteenth century. Her characters are well done and the story moves along at a pace that draws in the reader and won't let go. The story is told through the eyes of Katherine and Heathcliffe's nanny, Mrs. Dean, as she tells the story to man who has rented out part of Heathcliffe's property. Mrs. Dean's perspective is always humorous and one almost wonders how much of it has been changed to cover over her own role in the events. It is a testimony to her characters that by the end of the book you will end up hating some of the characters. I personally could not stand, Isabell's son Linton - he was whiny, selfish, pain in the a*s and I was routing for Hareton to beat up him up.

The only slight problem with this book is it was written in the old style popular during the nineteenth century - at times this makes the reading some what ponderous. In particular, Joseph's dialogue is a labor and in order to understand it I had to almost read it out loud.

Wuthering Heights is a wonderful story about two people who love each other so much that nothing can stop their passion. It is a story as old as time and that will endure until the end of time.

Rating:
Summary: Your cruelty arises from your misery...
Review: ...when you have nobody to love you...lonely like the devil and envious like him...nobody will cry for you when you die!

I don't consider "Wuthering Heights" to be a love story or simply a book about love, hate, and revenge, as it is often wrongfully described by many. I dare not say this is a social work either, but it is somehow concerned with broad issues such as social and familial oppression, the subordination and the disadvantaged nature of female lives at that time, the brutality of the patriarchal power, the unjustices of the inheritance law, etc. The most striking thing about this book is that it is concerned with extremities like love and hate, human and animal, life and death, masters and servants, earthly and divine.

Of course the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is maybe one of the main things of, at least, the first part of this work: they're like almost two waterdrops, both showing a fondness for freedom and nature. But their relationship (I don't know why I hesitate to call it love) is kind of dysfunctional, for lack of a better word. Maybe it's because of the lack of a mother for both of them, maybe because of their upbringing in an atmosphere of patriarchal brutality.

And maybe it's not a pure coincidence that Heathcliff's origins are obscure: when he first appears at Wuthering Heights he is dirty, ragged, starving and houseless, ill-treated by the patriarchal and he is refused education. As a critic simply put it, Wuthering Heights can hardly be described as a social novel, but it deals with many social themes, as Heathcliff might be seen as a representative of, maybe not the dispossessed, but at least of the oppressed; on the other hand Edgar reads a great deal, but his reading seems more a means of escape from the emotional turmoil which surrounds him rather than a pleasure per se. Besides, towards the end of the story, Cathy begins to educate Hareton, which later leads them to falling in love, as preposterous as this might seem earlier in the book: their previous enmity and hatred has been forsaken in favour of union through learning. Interestingly, as this is happening, Heathcliff, formally the force for energy (not a positive one), now acknowledges the draining of this energy and the lost of his faculty of enjoying their destruction and his being too idle to destroy for nothing (I have to remind myself to breathe-almost to remind my heart to beat: conscience has turned my heart to an earthly hell).

If the first part of this work depicts a fierce and passionate but also binary view of the Yorkshire moors society, the second part of it is about reconciliation, education, development and, thus, progress. At the end of the book the powers are much more balanced, the relationship between sexes more egalitarian, as E. Brontë seems to emphasize the need of the society to develop and move forward with necessary cohesion.

Or at least this is the way I see this novel, much more a social work rather than simply a book about love, hate and revenge, and that's what makes it, in my opinion, one of the best of its time. But hey, every reader may see and interprete it his or her own way: I guess this too is the beauty of literature, as that of music and art in general.

Rating:
Summary: The greatest book ever written...
Review: I had to read this in my senior year of high school and found that I could NOT put it down. I would linger after class to talk to my teacher about it, and finally she told me I could keep the school's copy for my own use. She could tell how much I loved it! I practically have tears in my eyes when I reread the first few sentences. This is the saddest, and yet the most hopeful book I have ever read. It's so beautiful, and Bronte has taken cares to describe the human condition of loneliness she doubtlessly felt during her own lifetime. These are some of the most realistic characters in all of literature, and YOU WILL NOT REGRET PICKING UP THIS BOOK!!! I can't even fully describe how much I love this book. Honestly, it changed me. The story is unforgettable, and exquisitely profound. I urge you to open your heart and let this book move you too.

Rating:
Summary: Well written, but....
Review: Did you, or did you not, want to kick Heathcliff and bite Cathy? Because I did. Yes, indeed, I did. No other book people have irritated me half so much, by just doing what I didn't want them to do. Kudos to Miss Bronte for such engaging characters, but one star off for spite because I like happy endings best. ;)

Rating:
Summary: Realistic but disturbing
Review: Wuthering Heights has very real, lively and more animated characters contrary to Austen and the like; and is told in a distinctive narrative form. I think the particular narrative style has been chosen because she wrote the book under a male pen-name.
The story is very realistic, perhaps livelier than real life stories, but is very disturbing; mainly because of the seemingly morbid presence of Heathclif. Though his character can be attributed to his disappointing childhood experiences, there is still a hint of that 'savage' instinct (as is often stated) which provokes him to be brutal to the core.
Catherine represents a typical girl caught in between 'real love' and 'wealthy love', finally chosing the latter since she fears she'd have to live an extremely poverty-stricken life if she chooses the former.
A question that arose in my mind while reading it is the unnatural importance given to a servant like Nelly, who seems to have witnessed each and every scene in the novel.
Reading the novel is an experience in its own; and,the novel, I'm sure is one of the best novels of its kind.

Rating:
Summary: Read it!
Review: WUTHERING HEIGHTS is without a doubt the greatest romance novel I have ever read. Anybody who has ever had a hopeless love for somebody else will understand the torment that Heathcliff and Cathy went through. The love shown here is everything that love involves: infatuation, lust, longing, and even hatred. Simply put, this novel is an absolute masterpiece! You owe it to yourself to read it! Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez

Rating:
Summary: Twisted but Engrossing
Review: Amazing book. I have to admit when I first started reading it for my British Lit class I wasn't at all interested. I found the beginning slow and tedious. But once I got into the flashbacks from Nelly I was engrossed and couldn't put it down. The book is dark but a great read.

Rating:
Summary: ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL
Review: This is the best book ever. I absolutely love it. It has so much feeling and passion in it that you can't help thinking about it long after you finish reading it. And, odd as it sounds, I think that Elton John's song "Original Sin" fits it very well. I love it so much and definately recommend you to read. Definately.

Rating:
Summary: The loneliness, the fog, the passion
Review: For some reason I expected this to be a Pink novel. Much on the contrary, it's rather black. It is a little masterpiece with no true Romanticism (or maybe yes). It is more of a Gothic novel, at least in tone and atmosphere. A man recently arrived to the Yorkshire moors is told, by his maid, the story of neighbors Earnshaw and Linton, and the Earnshaw's adopted and misterious stepson, Heathcliffe. The story spans decades of pure hatred, envy, horrible offenses and revenges, as well as despise for the human race. Each character lives immersed in their own bitterness and pain, with very little communication between them. BUT, beneath this surface there is love, the love between Catherine Earnshaw and her step brother Heathcliffe. In a way, it is a pure love, but it is also somewhat twisted and inevitably star-crossed. Out of this ill-fated love, a more normal and hopeful love will be born, but that you'll have to find for yourself.

For me, the best thing about this novel is the creation of an environment, the handling of the medium within which the tormented characters live. It is constantly tense, brooding, foreboding, with periodic explosions of anger, agression and grief. It is somber, macabre and rainy, like the place where it occurs.

Rating:
Summary: Passionate in the Most Primordial Sense
Review: Not to be hyperbolic, but Wuthering Heights is one of the most well known and critically acclaimed novels in the English language, and there is precious little that I can add to the volumes already written on it. It is the story of two British households inhabiting the wilds of the Yorkshire moors, and illuminates the destructive undercurrents that come to uproot and ultimately destroy both clans. At the center of the tale stand the headstrong Catherine Earnshaw and the brooding Heathcliff, one of the most celebrated romantic pairings in world literature. Treated abominably in his youth at the hands of both households and having lost his love to another man, Heathcliff descends into a horrifying abyss of brutality and revenge still harrowing to encounter nearly two centuries after publication. Although the novel progresses at a leisurely pace compared to modern works, it presents the most complete and thrilling portrait of passion ever set forth in the English language. Passion is not a synonym for love in Wuthering Heights-it is an unbridled conflagration consuming all rationality and rendering its victims ravenous beasts, terrifying and magnificent in their hunger. When Catherine declares that her soul will roam the moors forever after her death, even the most confirmed atheist will find himself believing her- passion is such a billowing force in Wuthering Heights that the human body is convincingly rendered a prison of something altogether greater. At the same time, the primordial forces the book presents never become exhausting, contained as they are within a highly unique narrative framework channeling them through characters secondary to the main line of action. For those patient and courageous enough to immerse themselves in its richly textured reality, Wuthering Heights presents a world boarding on the mythic, and it comes highly recommended to the imaginative reader.