Sylvia

I treated myself to a three-month subscription from Big Green Bookshop in the hopes of getting something new-to-me to read. This one was the first book I received, in July. I liked it for being a book I wouldn't have picked by myself, and I found the language flowed and kept me going, but the aimless life of the narrator (who appears to want to be a writer but doesn't actually seem to work for it, and where does the money to pay rent and food come from?) frustrated me from the start and I wasn't really keen on reading about a dysfunctional relationship with a mentally unstable woman. But as a short novel and written in a style that kept going, I finished it quicker than I thought I would.

I treated myself to a three-month subscription from Big Green Bookshop in the hopes of getting something new-to-me to read. This one was the first book I received, in July. I liked it for being a book I wouldn't have picked by myself, and I found the language flowed and kept me going, but the aimless life of the narrator (who appears to want to be a writer but doesn't actually seem to work for it, and where does the money to pay rent and food come from?) frustrated me from the start and I wasn't really keen on reading about a dysfunctional relationship with a mentally unstable woman. But as a short novel and written in a style that kept going, I finished it quicker than I thought I would.

Written as fiction but it is really a memoir and concerns the author's romance with Sylvia whom he eventually married. She suicided very young. She was nuts and needy and I couldn't imagine why he hung around. I guess their pathologies meshed.Well worth reading.

I love that I have these little time bombs sitting on my bookshelves. This has probably been on the shelf for 20+ years, and boom! it just exploded in my hands. A great book. How many others are waiting for me to discover them?

Heartbreaking account of marrying--and losing--a mentally-ill person.

Not a tragedy. Just a series of sad things. The style is accomplished, but there is no catharsis, and thus no purpose, in the author's sharing of his misery.

This is an engrossing albeit strange fictional story written in memoir form. It is written from the man’s perspective of his relationship with Sylvia Bloch. The couple is in their early twenties living in NYC in the 1960s. The two man characters are a broke writer and a neurotic, self-destructive, yet strikingly beautiful female comparative literature student.