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darkness but the cow stops me and the darkness rushes on upon the sweet blast of her moaning breath, filled with wood and with silence.”
    As I Lay Dying is a simple story, of a simple family—told with elaborate fullness. Perspective shifts every few pages; each brief chapter has its own teller. Through the eyes of one character, the scene may be viewed as if through a cracked lens, distorted and obscured. Then, through another’s, it comes into clearer view, the lens is reconstructed—granting a sense of discovery that is one of the novel’s joys.
    Faulkner is not easy reading. The scene shifts are one problem. Another is that he writes in what amounts to a foreign language, kin to standard English, but distant enough to sometimes make for heavy going: Anse tells how Vardaman, the youngest son, “comes around the house, bloody as a hog to his knees, and that ere fish chopped up with the axe like as not, or maybe throwed away for him to lie about the dog et it. Well, I reckon I ain’t no call to expect no more of him than of his mangrowed brothers.”
    Yes, the dialect demands work, at least for Yankee readers. But it’s worth it, as conduit to a way of life, a consciousness, as exotic as that of Russian aristocracy, or a Chinese peasantry, and no less compelling.

Wuthering Heights
    ____________
    By Emily Bronte
First published in 1947
    In this dark story of passion and revenge in rural nineteenth century England, not a single character gains our unmixed admiration.
    Nelly, the housekeeper who narrates most of the story, is devious and expedient. Edgar, who ought to be the hero but isn’t, is insipid and milkblooded, his sister spoiled and silly. And these are the more agreeable residents of the drama. Compared to drunken Hindley or Bible-spouting old Joseph, they’re almost appealing. And compared to Heathcliff, they’re downright lovable.
    Heathcliff towers over the Yorkshire moors like an avenging angel, a furious black cloud launching angry thunderbolts. “I have no pity!” he declares. “The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It’s a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.”
    This is no ordinary villain, but one of singular passion and ferocity, a villain’s villain. Yet Emily Bronte’s considerable art lets us sympathize with him. Picked up off the Liverpool streets, Heathcliff—just “Heathcliff;” he has no other name—is raised on the family estate, Wuthering Heights. He is treated well while Earnshaw, the master of the house, yet lives. But upon his death, the boy comes under the cruel dominion of Earnshaw’s son, Hindley, who humiliates him.
    Hindley’s sister Catherine, though, shows him kindness. The two become fast friends. The friendship ripens into love. But Catherine’s more conventional match to Edgar Linton, who lives across the moor at Thrushcross Grange—that’s the name, really!— frustrates Heathcliff’s love and completesthe hardening of his heart. The rest of the story relates Heathcliff’s deepening, mad passion for his childhood friend and his revenge on those he feels have wronged him.
    “Wuthering,” we learn, is “a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in story weather... One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.” In this stark country, by turns indescribably lovely and savage, the action of the novel takes place. (From it, too, Emily Bronte herself never ventured far for long.)
    It is lonely country, largely unpeopled, unsoftened by the civilizing influence of great towns, and the reader sometimes cringes at the emotional claustrophobia of it. From Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange and back again, sometimes to the moor