Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A disturbing, yet light, read, July 28, 2006
Removed, unemotional, disturbing. That's Sylvia Plath's excellent book. Starting with her successes as a young adult, The Bell Jar is a fictionalized autobiography, in which she gives herself a different name. It chronicles her life through her mental breakdown, including electroshock therapy, and her fellow patients. Accuratly discribing the stresses of a girl in the 1950's, including whether to be a good little housewife or to follow her dreams. What should she choose?
The book is easy to read and quick.
This book, written a few years before Plath's suicide, makes subsequent accounts of insane asylums seem inconsequential, dull, and whiney.
You'll never look at mental institution fiction the same again.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Bell Jar, Reviewed by Phoebe Young, September 2, 2008
A Kid's Review
Sylvia Plath's timeless novel The Bell Jar has without a doubt exceeded my high expectations. Her writing is nothing short of beautifully detailed, incredibly creative and downright genius. She, unlike other authors has the ability to keep her readers in such a way that to abandon the book is virtually impossible. Her novel is as smooth and effortless as her poetry. The heartbreaking story tells about the year she tried to kill herself and the inescapable feelings that haunted her, feelings of being trapped and alone - as if in a bell jar. My criticisms for Plath are little to none. The book is at times excruciatingly painful to read, the ideas that went on in Esther Greenwood's head are explained beautifully but are also about death and feeling suffocated, trapped and isolated - they are about sheer depression and the end of her innocence. It is hard to read the chunks in the book when the people that love her make desperately vain efforts to save Esther. And although the book's plot can at times be hard to digest, the writing is so fantastic that it is well worth the read.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Descent of Eve, October 2, 2007
Insanity is a weird thing - most people are `insane' to some degree or the other - while a minority succumb to the polarities of the disease and swing back and forth much like a pendulum. Sylvia Plath fell into the latter category, and while the positive end of her spectrum meant that she created some shockingly good work, the negative end ensured that she would meet a tragic and self-inflicted end. Her suicide I think, remains the most mechanical, yet most poetic death of all the great writers, and it's a pity that shes often remembered as `that woman poet who stuck her head in an oven' when in fact she was well spoken, eloquent woman whose command over the English language was much vaster and encompassing than yours or mine.
"The Bell Jar", her only full length fictional prose work, is almost autobiographical in patches. The publishers make it clear that this is not Plaths' own story, but you cannot help but identify the lead character as Plath herself. The way I see it is this - Sylvia created a fictional character, but gave it her mind and thoughts, leading to one of the most fascinating fictional characters in modern prose. To me, this was the literary equivalent of a convergence of both David Lynch's masterpieces "Inland Empire" and "Mulholland Drive". The same "a woman in trouble, yet she doesn't know it yet" theme permeates the entire novel, and by the time it reaches its (somewhat obvious) conclusion, you're left wondering how Plath didn't invest more of her time in churning out full fledged prose novels.
Simply put, this novel chronicles the descent of a womans' mind, but its so much more than that. It speaks of mental disease with a frankness that the author probably didn't quite comprehend at the time. Maybe she did, but either way, I think what she was doing her was to capture the state of her own mind frame by frame until that fateful day in real life when she so notoriously took her own life. "The Bell Jar" has its moment of adolescent wandering and naivete, which I found quite endearing considering the age of the author when she wrote this. Perhaps she wasn't mature enough to deal with life as she grew older, or maybe she was too caught up in her own web of literary wonder to crawl out of it. I think all the great poets were afflicted to some degree with this disease, and Plath is no exception.
If you're interested in a semi-autobiographical (though the blurb won't admit it!) book by a great poet, this is the book for you. Its never boring, and is quite an easy read as Sylvia trades in her famous double entendre poetic metaphors for more easily accessible and simply written language. Short crisp sentences. Clear dialogue. And yet, the sentences get shorter, and thoughts get more fragmented as we plummet with the author into the very depths of insanity. An unforgettable, and somewhat scary experience - but as a book lover, one you should definitely experience.
Five Stars.
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by Sylvia Plath
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