Wuther by V.J. Chambers
My rating: 3/5 cats
all i wanted to do with my labor day was to stay in bed all day and read a silly book. success!!*
i fully expected to hate this book. i mean, come on:
Instead of storms tearing through Yorkshire moors, the sounds of ’90s grunge rock whisper through backwoods American cornfields…
ohhhh – grunge! heathcliff in flannel! cathy in a knit hat!
hilarity.
and what the hell is up with that cover?? why is heathcliff sitting around shirtless getting his trousers all wet in… a lake??? a crick??? in west freaking virginia with his tummy-dent and … shavedness??
but despite “thera” (young catherine) coming out with sentences that are flat-out lies:
Almond milk was just as good as cow milk in coffee. It was even vanilla flavored.
incorrect. almond milk is fine in many things, but coffee ain’t one of them. and making your dad drink vanilla flavored almond-coffee is really cruel. but she gets that cruelty from her moms…
so – despite that – this wasn’t terrible. yeah, it’s eye-rolly at times, but it was not the train-wreck i had been hoping would entertain me throughout my lazy day-off.
here are some of the rollies, for your pleasure:
Nobody’s more attractive than Kurt Cobain.
hey! grunge-rock references! i am old!
and young cathy, (not catherine’s) first meeting with heathcliff:
He began to descend the steps. He was wearing leather pants and a black button-up shirt. There were silver rings on his fingers. He looked like an aging rock star. He looked like a harbinger of the apocalypse. He looked like a vampire from one of those shows on the WB. All he was missing was a flowing cape.
hey, i’m heathcliff! (heath) i’m a d-bag!
yeah, that’s what heathcliff wears just to hang around his house… in rural west virginia. suuuuuure. but whatever- WH is a melodramatic book, so it doesn’t not work to have heathcliff chilling in leather. and be a former roadie for counting crows. no one knows what heathcliff did during his away-years. he coulda been a roadie.
and it also has these scintillating modern-type conversations, this one coming from “eli” the edgar linton character:
“Oh, man. Cathy, you’re going to fuck me up, aren’t you?”
oh, yes. cathy will be doing that.
but she is also nearly a poet, with her appreciation of eli:
She looked into his eyes. They were beautiful. He was beautiful. He was like a Ken doll.
soooo, yeah. whatever, she’s sixteen.
and kind of a bitch, the way cathy ought to be. eli, again:
“I dream about you, you know that? I have these dreams where you’re ahead of me, and you’re running. You’re wearing this white dress. It’s all flowy. And you’re laughing. It’s like music, the way you’re laughing. And I’m running after you, running and running. But before I can catch you, I always wake up.”
She rubbed her neck. “Dreams are weird, right?”
dude, so cold! but also, eli’s lame-ass symbolically-clumsy dream is kind of like this:
which is awesome.
and there is philosophy! chillingly accurate premonition-philosophy:
She bit her lip. “People die. It sucks. but it happens.”
He rolled over on his side, facing her. “Right. Everybody dies. I’m going to die. You’re going to die. My parents are. Isabella. Everyone.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“No, really. It’s like guaranteed or whatever.
IT’S LIKE GUARANTEED OR WHATEVER!!!
killed me.
and here’s the last thing i am going to giggle on, because this book was really not terrible – i just like to point out things that make me crack up. there is no reason why the cathy in this story should be attractive to anyone. she is rarely given an opportunity to demonstrate what makes her so appealing in her doomed love triangle. this is the only real speech she gives, the rest of the time she is simply reacting to stuff. but it’s a doozy:
When I think about Heaven, I think about being free. And I think that if i was trapped in some place where people were happy all the time, it would drive me crazy. If all they did was smile and be nice to each other and walk by pearly gates and things, I’d start throwing tantrums. I’d tell whoever was in charge that wanted to be set out, back to earth. And then… I’d like to be the wind. I’d go wherever I wanted. Blow through things, blow around things. Have no shape. Just fly, free and bodiless, over the entire world. That’s my idea of Heaven.”
“Whoa.” Eli was quiet, gazing at her with something like adoration.
She hid her face, embarrassed.
“That’s really beautiful,” he said. “That’s how I think of you, too. You’re too wild to be contained, Cathy. Like the wind.”
“Whatever. I was only saying stuff.”
…
She closed her eyes. She bet the wind never felt guilty, even if it ripped the limbs of trees or the siding off of houses. If she was the wind, kissing Eli wouldn’t make her feel this way.
which i guess is what passes for deep thoughts among fairly sheltered teenagers, but it cracks me up. like, whoa
but i read the author’s afterword, and even if i hadn’t, grudgingly, been entertained if not completely wowed by the book, i liked her points. she looooves wuthering heights, and taught it for 6 years to AP english high school seniors, but even though she loves it, she recognizes it is a flawed book, for a number of reasons. for example:
…in the universe of Wuthering Heights, people seem to simply be able to will themselves to death. It’s very gothic of them.
and also the awkwardness of the framing device, and the treatment of cathy’s pregnancy, etc etc. i love WH, too, but i recognize its shortcomings.
on reading other (notably, all YA) retellings of wuthering heights, she laments:
But I began to get frustrated. No one seemed to be doing it right, I thought. For one thing, I was annoyed that the modernizations tended to overly demonize the Hindley character (Matt in my incarnation). I thought that Hindley was a complicated character, but that he was ultimately pitiful. Too often, he came across as the villain in the books.
Similarly, I wasn’t finding that Cathy and Heathcliff were demonized enough. I found that they were too sympathetic, when they were meant to be vicious, selfish characters.
In fact, all of the main characters in Bronte’s novel seem to be horribly flawed in various ways.
I wanted to capture the flaws.
…I changed some names for clarity. I cut a lot of boring stuff.
And Linton turned into a sociopath.
and i totally appreciate that. cathy and heathcliff are terrible, selfish characters, and too frequently, the impulse is to make apologies for their behavior in the light of their doomed passions. which is fine, but part of the allure of WH is the very fact that cathy and heathcliff are such assholes. this book makes that perfectly clear, which is refreshing.
and the additions and new complications chambers tosses in are handled well and give a little clarity to the story, and the necessary changes to it to make it more modern work fine.
it’s perfectly fun, and a whole lot better than some other adaptations/retellings i have read. it’s silly, escapist fun and nowhere near the flawed masterpiece of the source material, but it was a whole lot better than i expected.
thanks for the birthday treat, elizabeth!!!
