Reviews for Wuthering Heights

The average rating for Wuthering Heights based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-13 00:00:00 Declan Mccarthy A long, slow read, meant to be savored and it is worth it. I read this bit by bit over a few months. It mixes up the present with reflections of the past in stream-of-consciousness passages. There is little dialogue. The main character is a Polish man who fought in the resistance against the Germans and then the Russians in WW II. He was hospitalized for a year with wagon injuries to his leg. He's mainly a farmer but at times supplement his income as a barber and a clerk in the town hall. We read of his present doings and reflections on his growing up on the farm. He was one of four brothers. Two brothers left for the big cities and essentially never came back except for a visit of a few hours every three years. We see the infinite sadness of a mother writing to her sons who never reply. The youngest brother is mentally challenged and the main character takes care of him. --- but he's no saint. On one occasion he savagely beats his woman friend and on another, his brother. He believes in God but in a superstitious way; he comes to believe that God is the land. So what is like working on a Polish farm and growing up in rural Poland in what is probably around 1930's to the 1970's? When he was a boy they cut rye and wheat by hand with scythes and they used horses to plow and draw wagons. The hard work and tedium of cutting acres by hand! We learn of his parents strong but simple religious beliefs; how he wooed young women at dances and village fairs, blind drunk on vodka. With the coming of autos, for horse-drawn vehicles the road became a danger and a barrier to crossing the town. There are legal battles and fistfights with neighboring farmers as they try to encroach on boundaries. I'll let the author speak for himself with samples of his excellent writing: [On looking up at a crucifix] "Death draws you downward. With your head craned up it's hard to cry even. The tears get stuck in your throat when it's stretching up, and they trickle down into your stomach instead of into your eyes." [on his longing for a pair of officers' boots] "I felt as if dying in those boots would be a different kind of death than dying in ordinary shoes or barefoot." "The world's still the way it was, and all thinking does is make you want to think more and do less." On a battle that was fought over a patch of ground that held a cemetery: "It was so hellish even the worms couldn't take it anymore, let a lone the dead….There were skeletons bodies, coffins, all over the place, like death had suddenly gone on the rampage all on its own because it had run short of living people and it had dragged the dead out of their graves so it could kill them all over again." "Words bring everything out onto the surface. Words take everything that hurts and whines and they drag it all out from the deepest depths. Words let blood, and you fell better right away…Because words are a great grace. When it comes down to it, what are you given other than words? Either way, there's a great silence waiting for us in the end, and we'll have our fill of silence…And every word we didn't say to each other in this world we'll regret like a sin…And how many of those unsaid words stay in each person and die with him, and rot with him, and they aren't of any use to him either in his suffering, or in his memory?" "And weeping knows everything, words don't know, thoughts don't know, dreams don't know, and sometimes God himself doesn't know but human weeping knows. Because weeping is weeping, and it's also the thing that it's weeping over." "Back then, friend, when you died there was a hole left in the village, like in the road. But in those times, you might say death was attached to people. Everyone lived their whole life in one place, so the death of one person was kind of like the death of all of them. These days everyone's in motion, so death moves around as well." When someone talks of the main character's exploits in the war: "I just nodded, because the way he told it was truer than it actually was." As he lays with a woman under a feather quilt: "Real geese had worn them [the feathers] as they lived and ate and grew and went down to the water, they had red beaks and cackled the way geese do. Then the women plucked the feathers from the geese. The women lived once just like the geese did. Those might even have been their happiest moments, when they gathered on winter evenings to pluck feathers, because why else would they have lived? If you listened really closely, you could still hear the sound of their hands in among the down, and the songs they sang." The book was written in Polish in 1999 and not translated into English until 2010 when it won two awards for translated books, one of which was the PEN Translation award. Top photo of Polish farmers in 1930's from cultural-traditions.blogspot.com Photo of the author from wikipedia

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-10 00:00:00 Wendy Steeves Stone upon stone is an epic saga and vast panorama of rural life and the peasant's view of the world. The main character, country bumpkin Szymek Pietruszka, a cross between a philosopher and chronicler, in a simple though not plebby way spins a story of his own life. And we, readers actually feel as if we were sitting on the threshold of his homestead and before our eyes pass a colorful parade of people and events which he had participated. Country road, winding and full of holes hich one could go on the fair to the nearby town or to dance to the neighbouring village. And acacias which were growing by it and every summer smelled so stunningly that people walked like a drunk. And the cemetery which, during the war, was a place of six-week battle, and when it finally ended people had to bury their loved ones for the second time. And old verger Franciszek who with the acolytes had to catch starlings, titmice and other birds and let them out on cemetery to restore life and singing to that place again. And grandfather Kacper who forgot where he hid the document granting him the rights to the land, and that could make him a rich man. And grandmother Rozalia who drowned sailing to America and there is not even her grave, but after all it does not matter whether worms eat you in the grave or fish in the sea. This novel is like a river spilled wide, fed with digressions and secondary threads like streams, and you even not knowing when are swimming caught by its current. Tales flow lazily and we can see Szymek as a guerilla, barber, policeman, wedding official, government worker. We know he loved women and good fun. In fact loved life. Who knows, maybe living is the eleventh commandment that God forgot to tell us . In broad flashbacks we learn about his parents, grandparents, neighbours and the changes of the Polish countryside in the first half of the twentieth century. His two brothers fled to the city and Szymek who seemed to be the least predestined to the life on the land, eventually took over the patrimony and care of crippled brother. His family fell apart and so Szymek came up with a seemingly bizarre idea to gather them again by building the family tomb. Though they say a tomb is a house as well, just for the next life. Whether it's for eternity or not , a person needs a corner to call their own. Novel, written in form of monologues, woven from memories which gradually, tale upon tale, song upon song creates a vivid and colourful image. Alternately playful, full of simple truths and folk wisdom, then again, serious and reflective. With that novel Myśliwski in fact created monument to language and paid a homage to the traditional storytelling. Language is rich and exuberant, realistic even naturalistic descriptions mix with broad humour to be broken by lyrical passages or quiet meditation. Stone upon stone , this unhurried, digressive tale, is like an elegy to passing world and ode to life as well. Because as Szymek used to say he was always more interested in living than in dying.