The Bell Jar

Un romanzo che ti entra dentro con una violenza assoluta.
Molto autobiografico, racconta la caduta di Ester e il tentativo di rinascita: una giovane donna mangiata da pressione sociale e da forti aspettative da tutti quelli che la circondano. La descrizione del vortice che la inghiotte, fitto di piccoli e grandi autoinganni non può non colpire: chi non si è trovato in situazioni più o meno analoghe, in prima o in terza persona?
Una scrittura coinvolgente e con un uso della parola e delle immagini strepitosi sono poi l'elemento che mi ha portato a divorare questo libro e ad amarlo come non avrei mai immaginato e come non mi sarei mani aspettata, specialmente da una autrice che ha dedicato la sua vita alla poesia.

E fa male pensare ai show more forti tratti autobiografici e alla fine dell'autrice. show less

What an amazing book! Esther Greenwood is a brilliant, young woman who has a bright future in front of her but is slowly unwinding. Plath's descriptions of Esther's descent is frighteningly real and rational. Esther dispassionately (or coolly) talks about being cut off from the world around her, about giving up her scholarship, and finally about her plans for killing herself. The depression drips off the pages like large, black drops of pooling blood. This is always a personal story with so many clues to Esther's descent but the story never really explains why or what caused this break - was it because of her push to be the "scholarship girl", her indecision about what to do after college or her fear of losing herself to a man. Esther show more feels as if she wouldn't be able to do anything once she is married and yet they call her and wonders why because the only thing that is more clear than the depression is her contempt (fear?) of men. An excellent story that will have me reading, "Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963", to find out how much of this story was just really good writing and how much was auto-biographical. show less

The Bell Jar is not an easy book to read. If the reader knows anything about Sylvia Plath’s life--and everyone pretty much does since she committed suicide less than a month after its publication--then they know how the story really ends, and it was difficult for me to get past the knowledge of her own tragic life while reading. Yet the story is beautifully written. Bare, and breathtakingly honest, poetic and artful. It is a fictionalized version of Plath’s own life, chronicling main character Esther Greenwood’s internship at a New York fashion magazine, then her descent into madness as she returns home to live with her mother in between her stint at the magazine and resuming her studies.

Esther chafes at the thought of being show more under a man’s thumb and rails against conventions of the day. She doesn’t like babies and isn’t interested in pursuing the kind of life that society expected of women in the early Fifties. I have to wonder if things had been different for Plath if she’d lived in a more modern time and she hadn’t felt so constrained as she evidently did.

As Esther’s mental condition deteriorates and she slides further into her mental illness, the reader is thrown off balance by her jumbled thoughts. She becomes an unreliable narrator in that the things she describes may or may not actually be happening.

An important book for anyone wishing to gain insight into what a person dealing with clinical depression may actually be going through. show less

Dark and witty, one of those books that pulls you in as if by magnets. Esther Greenwood's life is filled with challenges, large and small, from unsuitable boyfriends to an inner darkness that fells her. The description of being under a bell jar is apt for anyone who has suffered from depression or mental illness, with the distortions such a glass would provide.
Even more gripping given the author's life, this is a step into the mind of someone having a breakdown, and her ultimate redemption.
A classic and deservedly so. Well-written, so much so that despite the often sad subject matter, it is impossible to out down.

I think it is safe to say The Bell Jar is a classic. Haunting and hurtful, you have to almost flinch away from the mental illness that descends on protagonist Esther Greenwood. Every time she fixates on a way to commit suicide you wonder, does she actually go through with it this time? Does she succeed? Then when you discover The Bell Jar is autobiographical it all makes sense and you think you know the answer.
There were so many different lines I wanted to quote. Because I connected to them so deeply, here are a couple of my favorites, "There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room" (p 29) and "There is nothing like puking show more with somebody to make you into old friends" (p 53). show less

An astonishing book in all sorts of ways, tipping preconceptions about gender, sexuality, mental health, and all sorts of other things into Boston Harbour with relentless determination. But also astonishing in the way it demonstrates just how much the world has moved on in the last sixty or seventy years (in no small part thanks to books like this). The description of the month Esther spends as a guest editor (=student intern) on a women's magazine reads like surreal social satire to us now, a description of a privileged world of show-kitchens, celebrity poets and haute couture millinery we can't even begin to take seriously, but of course it's directly based on Plath's experience at Mademoiselle in summer 1953.

With the perspective of show more half a century, a lot of the doors Plath was kicking against are standing wide open (but not all: growing up is still just as challenging as it always was, and there are still lots of difficult areas around mental health), and it's perhaps rather easier than it was in the early sixties to take exception to her narrator's very entitled, middle-class way of looking at the world. Although there were people who were aware of it even then: in her biographical note to this edition, Lois Ames quotes an evaluation of Plath's application for a grant from a literary foundation, where the assessor points out that Plath is exactly the sort of person who always wins scholarships and bursaries and it wouldn't do any harm to give one to somebody else for a change.

What doesn't change, and what will always make this a book you should read, is the radical way Plath's language cuts through to the absurdity of the world around her. Every image she deploys is even more precise and unexpected than the one before it, and you keep having to stop and ask yourself whether you really heard it right. show less

The first time I read this was in high school. The only thing I remembered about it was the bloody sex scene--which terrified me. Now, many -- many years later I've reread it. I kept waiting for that scene, and as I got to the end of the book, I began to think I had mixed this book up with some other book, because shouldn't it have happened early on? Well, it is in this book, and while unpleasant for the narrator, it is on some level, humorous. Actually, a lot of the book is rather funny, I had forgotten that. The various ways she contemplates killing herself is, despite the horror of what she is doing, quite hilarious. Sylvia Plath's novel is an amazing balancing act between comedy and tragedy and well worth reading. It is worth show more emphasizing that what may seem trivial or laughable to most people, looks very different from inside the "bell jar" where everything is distorted and confining. Plath manages to convey this very well. show less