Dear readers, I’m hardly a prophet but I think you’ll be hearing quite a bit about “Wuthering Heights” this month, thanks to the screen adaptation opening next week. (It’s not the first — see Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier above in the 1939 version.) The movie bills Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship as the greatest love story ever told. Now, I realize that infatuation and delusions of grandeur go hand in hand, but that’s still an awfully big claim. So our critic A.O. Scott sought to answer the question. “For the characters, the love itself overwhelms every other consideration of feeling,” he writes. “For Brontë, the most accomplished poet in a family of formidable novelists, that love is above all a matter of words. The immensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion is measured by the intensity of their language, which of course is also Brontë’s.” Still, judging by the comments, many readers are not convinced. I appreciated the reader who suggested “Wall-E” instead — touché. Who knows what kind of novels Emily Brontë might have written had she known about robots? On the subject of literary romance: Our generations-long love affair with mass market paperbacks is coming to an end. The handy, cheap editions you’d find in airports and drugstores are “pretty much over” as a format, as one publishing executive said. It may be impossible to find newly printed ones, but someone will have to pry my copy of Linda Goodman’s “Sun Signs” out of my cold, dead, Leonine hands. See you next week. Like this email? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
BEST SELLERS
|
