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Summary: my favorite book
Review: This book is beutiful and utterly facinating. A semi-autobiographical novel about Sylvia Plath's twentieth year, it is even better if you also read her biography "Bitter Fame" by Anne Stevenson. The biography lets you read about that year in even more depth.
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Summary: 'The world itself is the bad dream'
Review: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the most intriguing book that I have ever read. Her approach to a young woman's insanity is absolutely stunning and should be read by everyone. She has a poetic flow to her writing and describes everything so well that it is easy to create images in your mind while you read it. At one point in the book, I actually had to put it down because the character, Esther, was so convincing that I felt as if she were right in front of me, living the life that Plath created for her. The Bell Jar is extremely unique, strong and poetic, and it is a shame that Sylvia Plath descended into her own depression and killed herself not long after completing the book.
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Summary: Great Tale of Teenage Disturbance; pre-Girl, Interrupted
Review: I first read this work when I was in about 9th grade. However, because I had been so young and it had been so long ago when I read it I couldn't really remember anything but key elements and such. So, I decided to pick it up and read it again. This amazing work really gives you some insight of how sometimes privileged people fall to pieces. She paints a vivid picture of how painful life was like for her, and how she felt completely alienated by everyone except her therapist. The ending could be seen as a bit rushed, but the general feeling remains in tact. Definitely a great book to learn more about severe depression, and about her life.
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Summary: Most Memorable
Review: I read this book as a teenager, and have been fascinated by Plath ever since. Before the release of her journal, this was the closest that her fans could get to know her. A truly great book.
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Summary: Scary reminder of how depression was treated back then......
Review: I'm not one to read poems, and so, I guess because of that reason I stayed away from anything to do with Sylvia Plath. Until finally I grew tired of colleagues of mine talking about this book, and decided to experience it for myself.I'm still not sure to describe how I feel about the book. It was easy reading, but at times I did grow bored, particularly the pages that are dedicated to how Esther tries to commit suicide. And yet it would have been too important to leave out. Overall, the story of Esther saddened me, knowing that Ms. Plath was basically writing about her own life. I wonder if she had been born much later (when depression wasn't considered taboo), and she would have gotten the proper treatment for her depression, what could have been. Sadly, we'll never know. I didn't realize how much of a stigma was attached to depression or "crazy people" back then. In that way, the book touched me. In a way, the ending wasn't very satisfying, but maybe that's the point. Nothing everything is as clear-cut as we expect it to be.
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Summary: A book for an outcast.
Review: This book is simple yet extremely well written. Plath pulls everything together ina very easy way, but she goes much deeper than pure face meaning. She writes about Esther, a girl who is told she is crazy. Esther cannot seemto find a place in society where she fits. No one seems to understand her anywhere, and after many lifestyles she realizes there is no room for her in this world. Causing her so called depression. I reccomend this book to any women who ahs ever felt this way.
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Summary: Not a Salinger clone.
Review: Robert Taubman of the New Statesman mistakenly said "The Bell Jar" was "the first feminine novel in a Salinger mood". On reading the books first third you'll find yourself agreeing. Plath takes us down a path, seeming to say, "Look ahead. This will lead us to the end." Then we're repeatedly taken off of that path, down apparent detours without meaning or relevance. This is a deception. By the time you reach the halfway point you'll see that what seems to be important is only a grounding place for what surrounds it. What seems to be rambling is actually what is important. Eventually we abandon the original path completely, and find that all of those supposed meaningless detours were the true path all along, that the story's real importance lies within them.
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Summary: 4 Stars for Bell Jar
Review: The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath is the story of a young woman who progresses into a condition of serious mental illness. The book begins with Esther, the main character and narrator, having some very troubling thoughts. She is obsessed with the mental image of the execution of a couple convicted of treason. Esther recalls this part of her life as the beginning of her illness and a time of losing control. During a month-long stay at an expensive hotel in New York, we discover that Esther does not identify with any of the other young women who are staying there. She feels alienated from and inferior to them. When Esther becomes sick with food poisoning, she stays in bed and does nothing. She seems to be comfortable with being physically ill because it seems logical with her mental state. It gives her an excuse to lay around and do nothing, which is what she really wants to do. She is also able to avoid being around the people she doesn't fit in with, the wealthy young women. She is more comfortable being alone in bed than she would be dealing with others. When Esther is invited to go on a date with Constantin, she starts remembering a relationship she had in the past with Buddy Willard. She was more interested in what impression she made on the other girls in college than she was in a real relationship with Buddy. By going out with Buddy, she thought she would fit in better with the other girls. When Esther decides to go out with Constantin, she plans to lose her virginity believing this would make her more independent. When things don't work out with Constantin, she decides that she never wants to get married because that would stifle her ability to write poetry. She imagines that marriage would restrict her. After a very frightening encounter with another man, Esther goes back home to Massachusetts where her illness begins to get much worse. She hears her own voice as a zombie voice and is losing touch with reality. She goes to see her doctor who sends her to a psychiatrist. When Esther goes to see Dr. Gordon and shows him a paper that she had written in childish handwriting, he prepares her for electric shock therapy. The treatments are painful and Esther no longer trusts Dr. Gordon. After this, Esther begins to plan her suicide. Her death is the only thing she thinks about. When Esther takes an overdose of sleeping pills, she is sent to another hospital in the country. At this hospital, she meets Joan, an old friend from college. Joan is suffering from mental illness as well, but doesn't appear to be as sick as Esther. When Esther does finally succeed in losing her virginity, she ends up with serious bleeding and must be treated in a hospital. Esther has a hard time understanding why her body is injured. She thought this would make her independent, but instead, she is more convinced of her problems. While she is recovering, she learns that Joan has committed suicide. Esther is very disturbed by this because she thought Joan was in better shape than she was. After this, Esther realizes that a relationship with a man is not important to her. She feels she doesn't need this kind of relationship to be well. But when she leaves the hospital, she is concerned about how long she will be well before her symptoms begin again. This is what she calls the Bell Jar. Her illness makes her feel like she is trapped in a jar and she doesn't want to go through that again.
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Summary: Relatively Sane
Review: Plath was an incredible and intense mind. Through her writing, she sent emotions and feeling to an incredible amount of people. The story of The Bell Jar is really Plath letting her being seep out onto paper. The writing is classic and leads me to believe that the whole idea of "sanity" has become almost non existent, as well as overrated.
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Summary: An unpretentious, emotive fictional memoir like no other.
Review: After reading the biography of Pulitzer Prize winning poetess Anne Sexton of Newton, Massachusetts who committed suicide in 1974, I was gripped by the genuineness as well as the frank simplicity of The Bell Jar. In the Sexton biography - written by Diane Wood Middlebrook - there is a biographical passage on page 107 where, at the Ritz Hotel, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are having martinis and discussing suicide: "Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!" One can only imagine the two grand dames of poetry confessing and professing to one another how they attempted it and would vow to do it successfully the next time around. I gather in the interim of their morbid discourse, Plath's haunting (if that is an approropriate word) statements as well as Anne's invoked within one another feelings of invidious, pressing desire for their own quiet world, a world not burdened by day-to-day realities. The Bell Jar, however, is not a literary biography in the true defination. Rather, it is a fictional memoir in the same element to that of Fredrick Exley's A Fan's Notes, but it is written in the similar stlye to that of her literary compatriot J.D. Salinger and his semi-acidulous novels. In it, we have Esther (Plath), a very endowed, intelligent young woman who wins a summer position as an editor/writer for a New York magazine; after that job, things begin to slide, mentally, for Esther. She is more than bright (Plath herself received a Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University), but there is a strong percolating aura that everything around Esther is too run-of-the-mill for her unique and unquiet mind. And when the mind is unique, restless and sickly, those become the proper ingredients for what Esther suffers and endures - a depression that goes beyond fatalism. With a rejection to a writing course and a lack of sincere understanding, she spirals downward to her mental breakdown, her bell jar firmly encapsulating her in the realm of madness. Her options for a cure are worse then the disease itself: electrical shock therapy, incarceration to a mental hospital, psychiatrists, attempted suffocation, warm water and a Gillette blade, and lastly and perhaps more potently, a lack of understaing of what she was going through. This isn't a novel that says, Pity me! It says, Undersatnd me! This is who I am! This is what I am going through! This is what I am seeing! This is how I am feeling! When the mind is inundated with the horrors of truths and medical misunderstandings, the chosen path can lead a person to a place he/she can never return from. Perhaps, in some ways, a lot more smaller to Sylvia's and Anne's, all of humanity lives in a bell jar.
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