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Of all books, Wuthering Heights is the one - for me - that changes most between readings.
The last but-one time I read it, I found it crudely written and haphazardly constructed; the last time (about a month ago), I found its sophistication and elegance quite shaming.
At points in the storytelling, we are five narrators deep: a box within a box within two other boxed boxes.
As a first novel, there is very little that can compare to it. Even Shakespeare took over a decade to reach the clifftop extremities of 'King Lear'.
(Although the violence of Wuthering Heights, much of it implicit, might remind one of the much earlier 'Titus Andronicus'. The incestuous and necrophiliac undertones are closer still to Webster's 'Duchess of Malfi'.)
What makes this even more astonishing is the failure of the rest of Emily Bronte's work - her juvenilia, her poetry - to approach her one and only novel.
Her Gondal heroes are merely comic-book Byrons: Heathcliff is a weird miscegenation of Iago and Othello.
The story, seen one way, is extraordinarily simple: it is the Tale of the Cuckoo - the adopted bird who takes over the nest; seen another, immensely complex - whole theses have been written on the property exchanges that take place in the novel.
The writing itself is a fascinating hybrid: Nelly Dean's sadistic plainspokenness quietly distorted by Mr Lockwood. The resulting prose has a fantastic directness which, at the same time, can handle the subtlest paradoxes.
I'm already looking forward to my next, new Wuthering Heights - whatever it may turn out to be.
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