A harsh and brutal book

The big Wuthering Heights review fest seems to have mostly passed, with a few exceptions like this New Yorker review:

It rains so much in this movie that one half expects to see bamboo growing on the Yorkshire moors. The director, Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank”), and the cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, decided to shoot in natural light, and so, in the indoor scenes, we can barely make out bodies and faces moving in the dimming murk. The atmosphere is furtive, meaninglessly mysterious. Even the outdoor episodes are mostly grayish, and shot with shallow depth of field, too: as the handheld camera trudges after a character, the terrain ahead looks muzzy and dank. Filmmaking this dour is simply naïve; wanting to actually see the actors doesn’t make us decadent. With Solomon Glave, as the young Heathcliff—Emily Brontë’s wild and savage Gypsy turned into a quiet black boy from Liverpool; and the pie-faced Shannon Beer, as Cathy Earnshaw. James Howson and Kaya Scodelario play them as adults. All of the book’s poetry is gone; it isn’t even a memory. (David Denby)

Film Forward and The Moviegoer review the film too.

TIME looks at the box office results and notice what is highlighted from the film in passing.

Andrea Arnold’s rough-hewn version of Wuthering Heights (her Heathcliff is black) found a chilly reception: $8,800 on a single Manhattan screen. (Richard Corliss)

The International Herald Tribune's Rendezvous looks at this latest adaptation in the context of Hila Shachar's book Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Class Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company (the article is a reprint of a previous one in The New York Times):

‘‘Brontë’s book is not Romanticism — it’s a harsh and brutal book,’’ Ms. Shachar said by phone from Perth, where she is a professor at Western Australia University. ‘‘When you read the reviews from that time, critics called it savage, and they criticized it even more when they found out it was written by a woman. But we’ve turned it into a romance, because that suits us.’’ (David Belcher)

Express reviews Judy Finnigan's new novel Eloise and finds that,

As there is also a respectful nod to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, it is clear where Finnigan has gained literary inspiration (Jane Clinton)

Hannah Betts argues in the Guardian that 'Great literature should stay on all reading lists'.

In my first secondary school library lesson, we were handed a catalogue of books we would be expected to be acquainted with year-by-year from Jane Eyre to Paradise Lost, taking in a wealth of novels, poems and plays in between. It was unfashionably prescriptive, unapologetically canonical. I loved this list. It introduced me to illicit adult worlds, freeing me to think in ways prohibited in the more conservative realms of history, geography and, not least, religious studies.

La République des lettres posts a 1987 article on writer (etc.) Kathy Acker:

Post-moderne, Kathy Acker l'est non moins parce qu'elle laisse son texte être constamment traversé d'autres médias (le rock, le vidéo-clip, la bande dessinée), d'autres cultures (le vaudou, le culte d'Ogun), d'autres voix, d'autres flux, d'autres références (la physique quantique, l'anarcho-syndicalisme catalan), d'autres époques (la Sicile du XIXe siècle, le Yorkshire des Brontë, le Londres de Wedekind), d'autres devenirs (on peut penser au devenir-animal de Deleuze et Guattari, à propos des chiens). Post-moderne aussi, par son épistémologie non-duelle, son refus de l'univocité des is(th)mes (capitalisme, nationalisme, impérialisme, socialisme, etc). (Patrick Hutchinson) (Translation)

Interesting to see that the controversial housing plans in Haworth are reaching the Turkish media. The Morning Call features a student who picks Wuthering Heights as one of her favourite books. Abibliophobic posts about Tina Connolly's Ironskin and Bernur reviews (in Swedish) Jane Eyre Laid Bare.