afternoonbiscuit

Plath's reputation--poetry, depression, suicide--kept me away from her work for a long time. I came across this in a friend's library, though, and couldn't pass up a free try at it. Well done, Brynne, for having it and letting me borrow it. It is essentially autobiographic, only lightly fictionalizing the period in Sylvia's life during which she had her mental breakdown. For the sake of the real people portrayed, especially her mother, Sylvia never intended to have it published in the United States. There are a couple mentions, first in the foreward and then again in the "biographical note" that follows the novel, of The Bell Jar being a kind of Catcher in the Rye for girls, which I thought was an intriguing idea. I'd never thought of Catcher in the Rye as exclusively for boys, though, but rather as teen-centric. The Bell Jar is not quite the same for me; it resonates more with the post-high school period of my own life: college, in-the-meantime job, not knowing what to do with your life, etc. It's a novel more for driftless 20somethings. Plath = the anti-Hemingway in that, where Hemingway used the minimum amount of adjectives for a sentence to still sound good, Plath used the maximum. I love this book as much as I love Hemingway's best, as much as I love any of my favorite books. I love this book, period. I'm going out, right now, to buy my own copy.

2023-06-03 17:47