Wuthering Heights kept in a safe in North Korea

The Guardian shares some excerpts from Kim Ju-sŏng's memoir Tobenai kaeru: Kitachōsen sennō bungaku no jittai (The Frog that Couldn’t Jump: The Reality of North Korea’s Brainwashing Literature), translated by Meredith Shaw. It turns out that Wuthering Heights is kept in a safe in North Korea.

“By the way, how are you managing with the 100-copy collection?”

“Huh? What do you mean, the 100-copy collection?”

“The books in the safe. Don’t neglect your library duties. It’d be a disaster if anything leaked to the outside.”

I set off for the library at a run. There were books in that safe? I had no idea. I figured, at best, it would be a stash of treatises by the leaders on literary theory, or else records of secret directives for KWU eyes only. It turned out that the 100-copy collection was where the union stored translated copies of foreign novels and reference books that writers could access.

With the speed of a bank robber, I yanked out my key, turned the lock and opened the safe. Inside, tightly packed together, were nearly 70 translated copies of foreign novels. Seeing them, I crumpled to the floor in shock.

The first title to jump out at me was Seichō Matsumoto’s Points and Lines, a Japanese psychological thriller published in 1970. With growing excitement, I fumbled through the stack. There was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, O Henry’s The Last Leaf, Alexandre Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camellias, Takiji Kobayashi’s Crab Cannery Ship, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind; and, most exciting of all for me, Seiichi Morimura’s Proof of the Man, a Japanese detective novel that tells the story of a manhunt from Tokyo to New York. [...]

Some zainichi returnees like myself had brought books from Japan, which we passed around secretly. One of these was Proof of the Man. Upon finding a Korean-language copy in the 100-copy collection, I was struck by the quality of the translation. I later learned that it had been done by a zainichi acquaintance of mine who worked as a translator.

“Those sneaky bastards. If we ordinary citizens were to read this we’d be put away for political crimes, but they get to enjoy it all in secret,” my zainichi friend grumbled when I showed him.

Here's how Variety describes Too Much, the new rom-com created by Lena Dunham and her husband Luis Felber for Netflix.

“Too Much” follows Jessica (Stalter), a New York workaholic in her mid-30s who is reeling from a broken relationship that she thought would last forever and slowly isolating everyone she knows. When every block in New York tells a story of her own bad behavior, the only solution is to take a job in London, where she plans to live a life of solitude like a Brontë sister. But when she meets Felix (Sharpe) — who is less Hugh Grant in “Notting Hill” and more Hugh Grant’s drunken roommate — she finds that their unusual connection is impossible to ignore, even as it creates more problems than it solves. Now they have to ask themselves: Do Americans and Brits actually speak the same language? The series is an ex-pat rom-com for the disillusioned who wonder if true love is still possible, but sincerely hope that it is. (Joe Otterson and Selome Hailu)

A contributor to ABC (Australia) reflects on being pregnant at Christmas but also on Charlotte Brontë's pregnancy.

Until the approach of Christmas, my thoughts had turned more often to another pregnant woman I know only from the pages of beloved books. Charlotte Brontë fell pregnant around Christmas 1854, at the advanced maternal age of 38. Hers had been a tragic life in so many respects: blighted by loss and loneliness, financially and emotionally precarious, enduring the sordid dramas of her brother’s alcoholism, the thwarting of many of her own plans and desires, constant ill health and (frankly) bad weather.

Haworth Parsonage, in the romantically named but rather bleak West Riding of Yorkshire, turned out to be a literary hothouse where, from childhood, Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë sharpened one another’s creative talents, and eventually birthed novels that would take far-off London by storm and be cherished by generations of thwarted young women. Their heroines differ by temperament, moral sensibility, and fate, but all are marked by the social isolation that threw the Brontë women constantly back on their own (pooled) inner resources.

Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, Agnes Grey and Helen Graham, Catherine Earnshaw, and even Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone — some wealthy and some poor, many (but not all) orphans, some (but not all) finally reaching the “safe” harbour of a happy marriage and family — are all strangely set apart from those around them. Their sufferings, or their passion, or their poverty, make them different, and those who do attain happy endings must snatch them from the jaws of tragedy.

All this makes me wonder what Charlotte might have written later — after her marriage and the birth of her baby, after joining, in a way, the stream of “regular” humanity who procreate and bicker and grow old and pudgy and fret about their kids’ education and participate in local gossip. Would she have become more of a George Eliot, with both a keener and a kinder eye for the intricacies of a life lived within social bounds? Or would she have doubled down on her romantic, friendless heroines and their yearnings for love and adventure?

Emily and Anne Brontë had died within months of each other, in December 1848 and May 1849 respectively, succumbing to the tuberculosis that killed their older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, as children. After their deaths, Charlotte gave happy endings to her two most sociable heroines, Shirley and Caroline from Shirley (published in 1849). It’s thought that the two characters were based on Emily and Anne respectively, and that though Charlotte intended for Caroline to die of tuberculosis, after watching Anne — her last sibling — undergo the same fate, she could not subject her fictional counterpart to it as well. Caroline recovers and marries her love.

Charlotte, having refused a number of marriage proposals — including a first offer from the man she did end up marrying — went to the altar with her father’s Irish curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in June 1854, five years after Anne’s death. I wonder again and again how she felt taking this step, alone among all her siblings, with none of them in attendance; a vote for life after so much death, a definitive break with that sequestered, doomed, charmed family circle. Her life split cleanly in two halves, a future opening to her not, perhaps, of wide vistas and intrepid doings (as dreamed of by her Jane Eyre), but of the ordinary ups and downs of raising a family of her own with a man she (by all accounts) respected and loved.

It was not to be. A few months of domestic happiness, the beginnings of a pregnancy — but by Easter 1855, Charlotte too had been laid to rest in the family vault in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels at Haworth. Her death certificate records the cause of her death as phthisis – which is to say, consumption, otherwise known as tuberculosis. She had joined her sisters after all. But accounts of her final weeks suggest that she probably died from hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), severe morning sickness, followed, perhaps, by refeeding syndrome (when someone rapidly begins to eat again following a period of undernutrition).

In other words, Charlotte became severely dehydrated and malnourished, too nauseated to eat. (“A wren would have starved on what she ate during those last six weeks”, reported one witness, perhaps her maid Martha.) Then, presumably in her second trimester, she began to beg for food and eat eagerly — but it was too late. Without proper treatment, she and her unborn child died on 31 March 1855. (Natasha Moore)

Practical Motor Home recommends '9 of the best winter walks in the UK' such as

Top Withens, West Yorkshire

Said to be the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, the ruined farmhouse of Top Withens is nestled on the Pennine Way to the east of Withins Height. The hills of Brontë Country are a delight to explore at any time, but in winter, the dramatic landscape sparks the imagination, bringing to life the worlds of Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw. Round off your ramble with a restorative cup of tea in the nearby village of Haworth.

Stay at Holme Valley Camping and Caravan Park (Holly Reaney)

Libreriamo (Italy) recommends Wuthering Heights as one of five books to read when it's cold outside.