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Loading... The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  Letter4No1 | Dec 27, 2009 |  I read this book in high school, and while I wouldn't be able to tell you even the most basic information about most books I read at that age, this one still haunts me. Scenes and imagery from this novel still come back to me regularly, as if I had just read the book a few weeks ago. (  ) RachelWeaver | Nov 20, 2009 | You know, it's well-written and everything, but I don't know what the big deal is.Then again, I'm not 17. (  ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | You know, it's well-written and everything, but I don't know what the big deal is.Then again, I'm not 17. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | You know, it's well-written and everything, but I don't know what the big deal is.Then again, I'm not 17. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | 
 The Bell Jar is a marvelously unself-conscious confessional novel dashed off before such documents were in vogue. Now, however, it is as if the likes of Joan Didion have merely been sweeping the stage for Sylvia's ghostly comeback.  Her subject--the nervous breakdown and attempted suicide of a well-behaved, bright and successful college girl during the summer vacation of 1953--is hardly topical, and for careful, plain, dolorous prose style, which conveys the world of the heroine under the bell jar of madness with its "stifling distortions," offers few sentimental attractions. It is not a facile, entertaining or dramatic book; it has none of the sharp bitter humor and bite of her poems. It's not well shaped (it can be quite awkward); it offers no modish visionary thrills from the world of the insane, and though it has scenes of college life, the suburbs and the fashion magazine world of the 1950's for the most part it just hangs there dully and drags you down with its heroine; you don't believe she really recovers. Its vague, absorbent, melancholy pull lingers for weeks.  [Plath] had failed to understand Esther's malady, and had left behind an incomplete symbol of the age it reflected. Such a reading makes "The Bell Jar" a considerably better book than Miss Plath regarded it. Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing. It makes for a novel such as Dorothy Parker might have written if she had not belonged to a generation infected with the relentless frivolity of the college- humor magazine. The brittle humor of that early generation is reincarnated in "The Bell Jar," but raised to a more serious level because it is recognized as a resource of hysteria.
Amazon.com (ISBN 0061148512, Paperback)Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I seriously enjoyed The Bell Jar. It was like falling down the rabbit hole with Esther. Her actions, while not always rational don't often make the reader question them as they are reading. This incredibly solid decent into madness had me questioning my own sanity a few times. She's not annoying, which is a rarity on the crazy characters front. It was a quick, funny and thoughtful read that left me amazed. Some of the minor characters were annoying, but since everything was through Esther's prospective it is understandable. The progression of the story was very natural, just enough time passed so that one was aware it was happening, but there weren't huge gaps of time missing and all relevant information that didn't happen in the linear storyline was told in flashback or new headlines. There is obviously so much of Plath in this novel and it's really heartbreaking that she died so young. Definitely worth the read. (