The Girl Who Reads on the Métro, Christine Féret-Fleury (translated by Ros Schwartz)

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Juliette spend hours every week travelling on line 6 of the metro, and has come to know her fellow passengers by sight. She knows which of them love to read romances, which just stare out of the window, and has come to care for them. She always has a book with her but finds herself more often than not people watching instead. One day, she decides to get off the metro early and go for a walk. She happens upon a treasure trove of books, watched over by Soliman and his daughter Zaide. Soliman spreads his books throughout the city through a network of passeurs who watch people, picking out the perfect book for them. Soliman himself rarely leaves his book den, preferring instead to travel through reading. Juliette soon finds herself with a heavy bag of books she’s meant to find the perfect person for with no idea how to go about the task. An opportunity soon presents itself as she assists her colleague Chloe with selling a difficult flat with the help of du Maurier’s Rebecca. This reinvigorates her belief in every reader having the perfect book for the moment it finds them in. This gentle novel follows her as she explores her new role and considers where the right balance is between getting lost in the world of books and engaging with the world around her.

The most engaging character in the novel is probably Zaide. She is confident and intriguing, and the first person Juliette meets when she goes for her walk. She appears independent, roaming the streets on her own, a book propped in the front door of their home to keep it open for her. As she and Juliette come to know each other more she proves herself to be insightful and encourages Juliette out beyond her comfort zone. Her complicated family life does not seem to have negatively impacted her too badly, but she has gained a maturity through it while retaining a child’s eye view of the world which allows her to see things more clearly than many adults. 

Juliette herself is quite a solitary character, living her little life quite contentedly. She doesn’t long for any great adventure or to move outside of her normal routine too much. Meeting Soliman allows her the opportunity to try a different way of living and it suits her. The Paris setting is also fairly incidental - there were times when I wondered if I’d simply assumed it was set in Paris. The main heart of the novel is the characters’ love of books. It reminded me of The Little Paris Bookshop but with less of a plot. This is a gentle read which doesn’t invite too much questioning of the practicalities of the lifestyle choices of the characters. Beautifully written, this meandering novel is a lovely read if you want to escape from the world for a while. 

Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights, Essie Fox

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This post is part of a blog tour. Thank you to Random Things Tours and Orenda Books for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Fox’s retelling of Wuthering Heights places Catherine front and centre. The book opens with one of the most evocative scenes from the original - Heathcliif having her coffin dug up so that they can be placed together when his time comes. In disturbing her corpse he sets her ghost free and she is then taken through not just her own story but also that of her daughter into young adulthood. Fox’s writing fits nicely with the tone of the original, meaning that when passages are lifted directly from Brontë’s novel they fit quite naturally within the narrative. The story of Heathcliff and Cathy’s obsessive, unhealthy love for each other and the actions that lead to the destruction and misery of not just their own lives but all those around them is a powerful, frustrating, and heartbreaking one. 

A sense of place is so integral to Wuthering Heights; the contrast between the darkness of the Heights and the lightness of Thrushcross Grange. We see the Heights go from a relatively happy family home to one filled with grief and violence, later becoming a prison. The moors are also central, the place where Cathy and Heathcliff feel completely themselves, free from societal expectation or the judgment of Joseph. It is where they are able to come together completely. It is also a dangerous place - even those familiar with the landscape can get into trouble in inclement weather, and for those less hardy there is danger and foreboding in its wildness. Inhabitants of Thrushcross Grange are often banned from venturing beyond their own landscaped grounds. We learn a lot about the characters by where they feel most at home. Fox manages to capture the essence of this throughout.

The main purpose of this novel seems to be to make Catherine a bit more sympathetic, to explain the reasoning behind her actions and the guilt she feels when things go wrong. There are still many unlikeable characters of course, but, as with the original, you feel for them, understanding where things have gone wrong for them, and the ways in which the environments they grew up in have shaped them. Of course, there is a point where Heathcliff tips over into being unrelatable and although you do understand how he has suffered there is a limit to the sympathy you can feel as he seeks to destroy everything Edgar has ever loved. It felt slightly less extreme in this novel, although the same actions took place. The ghost of Catherine is horrified by what he has become, and the suffering he is inflicting on her daughter, but ultimately she continues to love him and there is a feeling of redemption. 

My main issue with this novel was that I didn’t feel it really added much to the story. For the most part you are just reading Wuthering Heights told in different words. Fox adds a few scenes here and there, filling in some of Heathcliff’s backstory, and taking away some of the ambiguity about his relationship with Cathy, but there just doesn’t feel like there’s any great depth being added. Yes, we experience a little more of her emotions as the story plays out, but they can be inferred from the original, so rich in feeling. Most retellings that I’ve read in the past focus on highlighting characters that were otherwise sidelined; in attempting a retelling based on one of the main characters it is inevitable I suppose that not much is gained. The point at which the story continues after Cathy’s death felt like the moment for more additions, to see how she responds to how everything plays out. For the most part this doesn’t happen, we are just told the story without comment. It is only in the last fifty pages or so that we get a little more insight into how she feels, what she thinks of the man she once loved so desperately, how she reacts to seeing her daughter grown up. If there was more of this throughout it would have felt a much stronger novel, as it is I couldn’t help but wonder what the point of the retelling was, and getting frustrated that we weren’t delving deeper with Cathy. That is not to say it’s a bad book, far from it, but I couldn’t help but feel that you’d be better off just reading the original. I adore the original, it is my most-read and favourite book, so perhaps I am coming at it from a critical place. I wonder how this book would be received by someone coming to the story for the first time. I imagine it would be read with pleasure. All the power and emotion of the original but perhaps in less intimidating writing, a bit less confusing with the repetition of character names in the second half. It is a worthy read, and the writing is rich and evocative, but for me I felt the enjoyment came from the strength of the original.

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