Blue sky, green trees.

Every character is horribly selfish and cruel, and I found the whole book extremely irritating. The only reason I stuck it out was because my coworkers love it and I wanted to try to love it for their sakes.

****UPDATE**

Saw this article and it perfectly captures the essence of Wuthering Heights. Specifically, it's the first paragraph which is perfection, and I'll copy it here in case the link ever dies:

“Wuthering Heights is the story of a group of people who eat the most miserable meals imaginable, and cannot experience love as a result. Sometimes they have tea, but more often they are merely offered it, and decide they are too furious to have tea, and die instead. Here is every meal the characters of Wuthering Heights almost eat before being interrupted by sex-rage and dying.” -Mallory Ortberg, The Toast

Wonderful wonderful wonderful. I was completely absorbed by the story.

This is 327 pages of description and not a single paragraph of plot. There is nothing that happens, and when it seems like the author might be about to make something happen (for example, when Orlando joins a tribe of gypsies) it gets lost in a fog of inner dialogue and grand description, and suddenly the reader finds that whatever might have happened is over without ever materializing. Also, two of the more intriguing promises on the back cover - that Orlando goes from man to woman and lives for 300 years - are not addressed satisfactorily, if at all. The gender change occurs in some mystical fashion that involves Truth and Chastity, and while the change occupies a great deal of the rest of the book the how-and-why is never addressed at all. The longevity issue is only directly mentioned in the following way: a bunch of blah blah blah about a poem she's been working on, then the sentences “She turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for close on three hundred years now”, and then moving on to the changes she made in the poem. That's it! The author seems to have thrown in sex changes and immortality just for the hell of it, and in no way attempts to give context or understanding to the reader. Lots of boring descriptions about London, yes. Plot or coherent use of literary devices, no.

The book is very subtle, and at the beginning a little slow. Give it time. The magic is in the layering, the shifting, and the repeated tiny dawnings of understanding that start the process anew. Quiet, delicate, and profound.

Only two complaints with this book. First, the author had a habit of introducing an idea and then saying that it wasn't really relevant to the book, and would drop it. It was weird to hit these dead ends, and made for disjointed reading. Second, the author used “man” in the supposedly universal sense, which doesn't actually exist (All men are mortal; Sarah is a man; therefore Sarah is mortal). Since this book was first written in the 1970s, when apparently logic did not exist (bellbottoms!), I'll let this slide. We are all a product of our times, and back in the author's day this was a reasonable way to write. Aside from these two issues, I loved the book.