The Bell Jar- Sylvia Plath
Brilliant. One might not call her a literary genius, but she does what most geniuses fail to achieve. She makes you live the moments. The language is simple yet there is touch of the beautiful string of words used to describe things, feelings which we all feel, see, hear, but can never point a finger at. We have all felt this way when we were sad, the suffocation that we could not explain. Yet, she describes it quite simply-'Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.'The underlying emotion is sadness. But it is devoid of any dullness one might expect out of the story of a person who is depressed. On the contrary, everything Esther Greenwood(the protagonist, a loosely disguised version of herself) does or says or feels evokes a curious rush of adrenalin, the kind one might feel when one is about to kill themselves. We know it is wrong, that it'll hurt, yet we continue because we want to see and feel exactly what happens. You are not sad when her attempt fails, niether are you happy when you think she has succeded. You have given in to profane acceptance. You read it with a kind of numb resignation. Just the way Esther lives.
Esther makes you sad. But not for herself. She just reintroduces you to your own sadness. We witness the slow descent of a girl who has everything and is set to achieve even more to a girl who feels empty and sees herself in a 'Bell jar' suffocating her being and distorting her view of the world. She says, 'To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.' No one reason is given for her nervous breakdown. The book starts with the nervous breakdown. It does not answer the whys or the whos, it just starts from the point where Esther begins her descent. And maybe it is this lack of reason behind her descent that makes it possible for the reader to connect, not in the been-there, done-that way, but in a way where one reads as if echoing there own thoughts from the time they were sad.
The title could not have been more apt. After you have read the book, the mere title will bring back those memories. earlier reviews have called it 'deeply disturbing'. I agree. However, it is traumatic in a beautiful way. Each one of us has at some point of time been in that bell jar. And it is important to read of someone's coming out of it.
Throughout the book you will feel as if your heart is just about to break but in the end, you are somehow saved. That a weight is lifted. It is perhaps very sadistic of me to suggest the readers to do as I did, but right after finishing the book, I read about Plath. About her life, and the end. And that broke my heart. Yes, this book is a thinly disguised fictional version of her life. And she describes the time when she had descended into madness while trying to understand life. This book is about a girl confused about what she should do, about a girl who is expected to resemble many people who have helped her at some point of time, about a girl who has it all and one by one she throws away everything she has, just like when she throws all her expensive clothes from her hotel window, about a girl who feels the weight of the male dominated society, about a girl who wants to be 'her own woman', about a girl who tries to kill herself, about a girl who has lived in a Bell Jar, about a girl who eventually comes out of it. Only, the book ends at a much happier note. The story really actually ends with Sylvia Plath herself. She once mentions, 'How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?'
Call it foreboding or a simple irony. This is what breaks your heart. And this is the beauty of it all. A book that has become such a literary genius because behind all the words is the reality of Plath's life, her death giving the perfect finale.
Why read?
Beautiful expression of thoughts of a patient of chronic depression.
It will absorb you not only while you are reading but for days after that.
The kind of book that makes you think and reflect.
Why not read?
No particular story or plot or mystery.
No suspense unless you count whether the protagonist will die or not.
Traumatic, depressing.
Where to download?
If you can't find the ebook, leave a comment with your email id or just leave a comment, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. :D
