Wuthering Heights

Every once in a while I feel inclined to read a book outside of my normal scope of literature. Mostly I read modern novels less than 100 years old and any sort of modern nonfiction. 1800s British lit isn’t exactly a strong point, but yet I still feel the need to give it a try every so often when such a book comes into my possession.

Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. You know, the kind where you have to slow way down to understand what’s going on, inevitably there’s some character that speaks in an accent or dialect that is beyond comprehension, and there’s always something to do with cousins marrying each other, then killing each other, and riding horses through “the moors.” Whatever those are.

What I wasn’t expecting, though, is a book that is all sorts of dark. Well, as dark as a girl in England could have written 150 years ago without getting thrown in the loony bin, anyway. Every character is plagued by some sort of evil, and a couple of them don’t have a good bone in their body.

So what ensues is a 200-year-old British soap opera where kids are marrying each others’ inlaws (not cousins, but close enough). And there’s this guy Heathcliff who only does stuff to piss people off, so he marrys his brother-in-law’s sister, just to make the guy angry, cause the guy married his sister. Well, sort of sister, cause Heathcliff’s adopted.

And then (SPOILER ALERT) pretty much all the main characters die from either grief or madness.

The long and short of it is that this book isn’t too bad. A slow read for me, and not worth reading if you want something happy, but still well done, considering the odds were against it for me in the first place. But yeah, Wuthering Heights is pretty much a book about how to make people unhappy.