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Summary: Interesting Read
Review: Like other poets and writers, Sylvia Plath got her acclaim after her death, in her case, suicide. Suicide always helps to enhance a person's worth in the art and literary world. Does that sound harsh or cynical? I bet Ms. Plath would agree. Her suicide was a great career move.I just recently read this book and it is well written and interesting. I heard "The Bell Jar" was semi-autobiographical even though it is listed under fiction and called a novel. I mostly wanted to read it because I too have suffered from depression and wanted to see if I could identify with anything Sylvia Plath wrote. Yes I did, with many things. I especially identified with Esther not wanting to bathe and how it seemed a waste of time. I never went three weeks without bathing like she did, but I did get where I considered showering and washing my hair a waste of time, like she said, because we would just have to do it again. That's only one example from the book. I would like to read a good biography of Sylvia Plath now to see if I could get some insight into things that "The Bell Jar" left dangling for me, such as why she/Esther disliked her mother so much.
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Summary: An indepth look at the struggles of a young woman.
Review: An in-depth look at the struggles of a young woman. Reviewer: Linville LA Student from Linville, Louisiana I really enjoyed this book because it took you inside the mind and heart of Esther Greenwood. You always knew how she was feeling. The Bell Jar is a story about a successful woman who struggles with her inner self and some social issues. She gradually slips into a deep, dark depression and struggles to find the light of day again. She has problems with her mother. She can't seem to get a relationship worth keeping. She had problems finding someone she could trust; someone that could and would help her. She admits herself to an asylum, where she spends a lot of time. Shock therapy was proven ineffective and therefore pointless. She just drifts deeper and deeper into her state of depression until she does not even know who she is. The only thing I didn't really like was the ending of the book. You never find out what happens to Esther. Her destiny is left up to the individual reader.
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Summary: An unforgettable account of the descent into madness.
Review: (I'm writing this review years after first reading TBJ, and am not quite as worked up as I was years ago.) Unlike many other readers of Sylvia Plath, I read The Bell Jar as part of a class assignment in grade 12, discovering her prose before her poetry. My first impression of Plath's only novel was one of awe. It's simple style and detached narration make it memorable in that it doesn't muddle the subject matter with melodramatic statements or situations. Sylvia Plath writes of her descent into insanity with such coolness and ease, that it is utterly difficult to see where she actually feels the Bell Jar starting to close in on her. Herein, Plath deftly blurs the line between reality and madness. Anyone who is interested in a classic story, one that is touching and poignant, read The Bell Jar. No other novel I have read so well explicates the human condition as this one does. Wow.
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Summary: A poignant, moving masterpiece
Review: This is a work of art. It is Sylvia Plath's scarcely disguised autobiography, the painful story of how she attempted suicide and how she was "stuck together with glue" as I've once heard it put. The prose is breathtaking and the story is heartbreaking. It is a brilliant and thought-provoking work.
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Summary: The 50s
Review: This novel of about 200 pages consists of two quite different halves. Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college girl in the early 5Os, spends a month in New York as guest editor with a women's magazine. The first half of the novel is about her adventures with the other college girl guest editors in New York. These are extremely funny. The mood, however, is darkening constantly, so that on should not be too surprised that Esther collapses completely after the expected admittance to a writing course does not come through. The second half of the novel is about depression, suicide and psychiatric wards. The book is fascinating (although I was a bit surprised to see some reviewers rate it among the greatest novels of the century), but the narrator is not always reliable - after all, she feels she experiences life through a bell jar, cut off from the rest of the world. The book does not really help the reader understand depression the way "I never promised you a rose garden" by Hannah Green did for schizophrenia. We only get a very hazy notion of the nature of the therapy, for example. Maybe it is because the novel is strongly autobiographical, but the narrator always keeps a certain distance to herself. There are lots of things she would never tell. There is hardly anything she would not joke about. After all, that is what many reviewers forget to mention: "The Bell Jar" is a very funny book with some billiant satire on 50s America - not just in the first half!
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Summary: The Bell Jar by Victoria Lucas
Review:
Sylvia Plath entered this world in 1932 and decided for herself it was time to leave, amidst a turmoil of tragedies, on February 11, 1963.
The Bell Jar is basically a semi-autobiographically novel of her madness, self-destruction, and struggle with her oppressor. The bell jar is symbolic for the pressures society has placed on her. This novel shows her inability to free herself from the constrictions placed on her life and thus, this begins her slow breakdown of her mental entity. Her road to recovery begins with shock therapy, which only results in resentment. The novel is mixed with despair, almost a confessional call for help and her insecurity.
Her words are so brilliantly eloquent, yet Plath writes in such a succinct and simple way, that any reader will be able to absorb her works and interpret them in his or her own way.
I definitely recommend this book, whether or not you've ever read any of the other Plath's works.
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Summary: The Mind
Review: The Bell jar was a great book about a girls life, and all the problems she faced.The main character was Ester. this book was all about her life and how she goes through many breakdowns, and even admitting herself into a mental hospital. The main themes of this book were depression and problem relationships. A big part dealing with sex and her relationships with guys that never seem to work out. I recomed this book to any woman over the age of 16. This book also kind of reminded me of the movie Girl Interrupted. Dealing with the issues of the person and who they really are.
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Summary: A must-read for any Plath admirer
Review: This is the only novel written by the famous poet Sylvia Plath. It is autobiographical in many aspects and covers her attempted suicide. The critics thought this book wasn't as literary as they had expected and I agree that it was more fun than seriously literary. They predicted the next novel that she was in the process of writing would be better in a literary sense but she never finished it before her suicide. I agree that the book is not of the same literary quality as her poems and that this is worth mentioning in a book review, but it was still great and it is a must read for any Plath fan. This novel starts with the heroine's coveted internship with a posh fashion magazine in New York City, and then retracts to cover past aspects of her life, such as college and dating. The story then continues to the heroine's descent into madness, including her experiences with phsycologists and asylums and electric shock therapy. This is one of the best books I have read recently. Parts of it made me laugh out load and other parts made me incredibly sad. The heroine experienced and felt things so deeply, and Plath had a way of making me feel them and experience them along with her. This is a fast-paced and still thought-provoking book that I finished very quickly, and then went back to read some parts again and savor the sweet little details. The Bell Jar deserves to be on everyone's bookshelf, or better yet, bedside table, being read and reread again for the delicious little emotional masterpiece that it is.
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Summary: I am 16 yrs old...
Review: I read this book after hearing it mentioned in a movie and not having any idea what it was about. It was extremly interesting and made you question how close you could be to going "over the deep end". It was def. worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Deep, Dark, Dreamy and Dandy
Review: I loved this book! It's not a very long book, only about 200 pages or so, but man oh man it's an intense read. In my case it took me a year to read this book, so I felt like I was right with Ester Greenwood. I'm the biggest Sylvia Plath fan that I know and I was turned on to her by reading "Daddy" in an english class I had. And I just have about everything that she has done. Her way with words is sexy and at the same time dark, it seems very unusally for a woman in the 1950's and 1960's to have written like that, but I think it's great she broke the gender role! It's truly a shame that she never wrote another novel like this one, even though there are rumors that there's half of an unfinshed book of hers out there. Man we better call Mulder and Scully.
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