Customer Reviews

Sylvia and Ted

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes' mistresses in the 1970s; she published Burnt Diaries, her memoirs about Hughes, not long after his death. Now she has published a 'fictionalized' account of Sylvia, Ted and Assia.

I have been reading and studying about Plath for many years, and thus know quite a bit about her, and find the fictional portrait of her to be off, overripe. I don't know how much 'fiction' there is in the book, for instance are all statements made in quotation marks for real? Because this novel relies *heavily* on the actual events in Plath's and then the Hugheses' lives, any fiction will either be garishly out of place (the whole Kate Hands episode) or will be vulgar, such as the idea that Plath found out that Assia was pregnant and that *this* is what drove her to suicide...

Plath (who is the main subject of the book; Assia is much less thought-out and is dispensed with in a perfunctory way) is done a disservice here; in Burnt Diaries she asks Hughes what she was like, and he won't say a word. Maybe it was because of books like this.

I am giving it one star for the the cover, for its merciful brevity and because it reminded me to get some red lipstick.

SYLVIA AND TED, a strangely designed blue-gray book with a flower whose petals are grasped by fish hooks on the cover, a short novel by one Emma Tennant, sat with multiple copies on the table of "drastically reduced books for sale" at a local bookstore. Interest in the poetry of Ted Hughes and also that of the last works of Sylvia Plath made me curious enough to buy it without much thought. And it sat on my desk for months until one rainy evening it served to usurp my time for about three hours of reading. It is a strange book.

Emma Tennant (despite her apparent connections with Ted Hughes) is a curious writer. In SYLVIA AND TED she seems more intent on creating an atmosphere for the odd love story between two poets than in committing a biography to paper. In doing so she succeeds on some levels. The book is divided into years of importance in the lives of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill - and in this manner she seems to be in awe of Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS, so intense is her exploration into the dark moods of each of these moments in time. And had she remained focused in this style then this book would have had a better chance at succeeding.

Tennant's problem is her self-indulgent verbiage, waxing literary in mythology and in symbolism that is more of a distraction than a significant modifier to the tale of two suicides over a single poet. To her credit she does manage a style of reportage that constantly keeps her in a position of close observer to the creative mind of Sylvia Plath. There is enough information about the disintegration of Plath's mind to make her suicide seem credible, no mean feat for a writer. But why include Assia Wevill from the very first of the book, weaving her in and out of the story at will as though setting Assia up a trope for all of Ted Hughes' well-documented assignations?

Quibbling? Perhaps. This is not the book to read for a biography of these well known subjects: this is a theme and variations on the lives of artists heavily weighted with poetically inclined diversions. It has its moments. Grady Harp, March 2005

Unconvincing novel about Sylvia and Ted.She was a suicidal neurotic,he was a male chauvinist.End of story. To re-phrase Oscar Wilde,'To lose one wife by suicide may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.'

A mesmerizing, fragmented novel of unique and bereft characters. These compulsive, creative souls feed off each other, competing furiously for their art and their personal space.

A lesson here for artists and authors: ground your work in self care - not obsession and compulsion.

All these one-star reviews are dead on. Oddly, though, from a mathematical perspective, if you add them all up, they only amount to about a half a star. That's how awful even the mere conception of this book is. If you have any doubts, let me offer one thought that I don't see presented so far: Do you really think it's just happenstance that this book only exists now that the three principals are dead? Tennant would have had her tail sued off had she tried something like this in Hughes' lifetime.

This book is in spectacularly bad taste. The "fictionalizations" is spiteful, jealous, transparently vindictive, and very badly written. So much so it is almost laughable in places.

The author does not appear to understand that slandering someone is rhetorically very difficult-- usually the reader will see through the attempt, and end up sympathizing with the one being slandered.

She particularly loses credibility in her portrayal of Clarissa Roche-- presented in this book as an almost angelic presence in Plath's life, with no gray areas. By golly, look at that! The book is dedicated to Roche! Uhmmm.. just how stupid does she think her readers are?

My benefit of the doubt points for both Plath and Hughes have skyrocketted.

I found this novel disappointing, even somewhat offensive. The liberties taken with the lives of Sylvia, Ted, and Assia seemed in poor taste, and much of the "poetic language" of the book was forced and overwritten. I'm as much of a Hughes/Plath fan as anyone, and I enjoy reading biographical and analytical books about their relationship and respective poems, but this quasi-fictional rendition of their lives (especially so soon after Hughes's death) left me uncomfortable; the early sections describing Assia's "coquettish" youth were the most troublesome in this regard. Interested in Sylvia and Ted (the poets)? My advice is to buy Birthday Letters, the new Plath unabridged journals, or Rough Magic instead.

This is the story of the lives of temperamental poets and writers Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes.

Sylvia committed suicide in 1963, after a series of jealous outrages due to her husband's infamous infidelities; firstly with their 15 year-old baby-sitter and then with a rival poet and magnificent Russian beauty, Assia Wevill.

Tennant reveals the emotions in Plath's life from 1935 when she was a two-year-old, continuously separated from her German parents and cared for by her grandparents in America. A gifted student, Sylvia wrote at an early age. At twenty-one she moved to England after she failed to be admitted to Harvard University.

In England, Sylvia strives for two goals, one to produce children and another to produce brilliant writing. She fails in both for a long time, and with great anguish, until the two goals converge at the same time. The stress of the two creative forces and the competing pressures for priority take their toll. At a time when she should be fulfilled, she fails at her marriage.

The writing tries to link Sylvia's relationships with her father and grandfather to her relationship with her husband, intermittently overlaying references to her poetry. It only partly achieves this while falling short of detailing the complexities of the tortured lives of ambitious artists. The novel is primarily for Plath devotees as the poetry references are rather tenuous. As a story it leaves many unanswered questions for the general reader, yet it's worth a read.

Martina Nicolls, Author of "The Sudan Curse" and "Kashmir on a Knife-Edge"

Since only real names are used and some chapters seem to follow Guardian articles beat for beat this novel really blurs fiction and non-fiction.

Tennant writes beautifully, and it's best to think of this as rather heated, dreamy character studies since the plot is often difficult to track. You won't learn much here if you've seen the movie "Sylvia." But still, some of the imagined childhood of Assia, and certainly the dinner with her sad child, were effective. Ted largely remains a cipher, but perhaps he was; images of him as a killer are haunting.

Not a lot of suspense and forward-motion, but lovely writing.

This is one of the most gorgeously written books I have ever read. Emma Tennant is a poet, like the late Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were. As a result, she may take a scene with Ted Hughes at a restaurant and describe in poetic detail how he eats, watches, moves. To many this might seem ridiculous. To a poet, even Bob Dylan (who said something about - a wise man looking at a blade of grass), it can mean a great deal. Bottomline here is this. Ms. Tennant is not interested in her role and brief relationship with Ted Hughes. As a female poet who faced the same sex discrimination in the arts which Plath did, she wants to set the record straight for Sylvia Plath. And she does this with such style, panache, page-turning fascination - that if you have anything like a poet-at-heart within, you will simply adore the book.