Heathcliff in the swimming pool

Two book reviews appear in The Guardian that have some slight Brontë connections. It seems that Juan Marsé's 'El embrujo de Shanghai', that in English changes its name to 'Shanghai nights', is being translated to English more than ten years later its first publication (in 1995).

The reviewer mentions how
Susana is a capricious girl who spends her time painting her fingernails and indulging in wild cinematic fantasies in which Scheherazade and Quasimodo appear in Wuthering Heights.

Susana is one of the leading characters, 15-year-old girl bedridden with tuberculosis. What the reviewer forgets to mention is that, in the same fantasy, Susana gets acquainted with Heathcliff who she places in a swimming pool with Esther Williams, nonetheless (and The Eyre Affair was not published yet :P). By the way, the novel has a movie version, directed by Fernando Trueba in 2002. The project was originally a Víctor Erice's one, and his extraordinary script is published in Spain, but regrettably he was not the final chosen director.

The Guardian also publishes a review of the last book of Peter Rusford, A Dead Language. The book has no Brontë connections as far as we know, but the reviewer quotes something from a previous book of Mr. Rushford "Pinkerton's sister":

It might have been called Reading. Its heroine, Alice Pinkerton, is the spinster daughter of wealthy suburban New Yorkers. She reads, as Dickens once said, for life; and her obsession with books (with the Brontës and Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe and Tennyson, and so on) comes across, publicly, as a kind of madness, for which her small-minded neighbours hold her up as a curious exhibit.

We already posted about this book, so if you are interested you can read more here.

Categories: Books, References