THE BELL JAR

This stellar novel by Sylvia Plath spawned me to think about how delicate the human brain is. Sylvia connects suicide with a bell jar. I thought about that...what is a bell jar? If you are trapped under a bell jar, you are doomed...there is no way out unless someone (a psychiatrist or a counselor) relieves the pressure and lifts the patient’s doubt, dejection, and lack of self-confidence out of the jar. Our protagonist in Sylvia’s novel, Esther Greenwood, slowly gets depressed over things that would normally not affect one’s attitude. This novel made me ponder depression more than any other recent novel. Just as Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye (see my review of 11/23/2012) made me imagine...so did Esther Greenwood. Wow, good ole brain exercise! Think back, how many books have you read when days after finishing, you were still mulling it over. Not many. Maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see my review of 12/9/2012) hit a nerve. It also occurred to me that maybe some people are predetermined to have mental problems. In this novel, nothing that happened to Esther Greenwood should have been powerful enough to shake her confidence as it did. Are these the same morale problems that our author, Sylvia Plath had? The pundits say yes. It seems that as self-doubt and ego dissipate, suicide seeps into the mind and locks the bell jar down forever. No way out. Asylums seldom cure... only lock up. And yes, as you will find in this novel, electric shock treatments to the brain don’t help. BTW, this author has a way with words that would make any literature teacher applaud. 

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read in the papers-goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” So that’s the first paragraph of the novel. Bingo! Right away I knew the direction of the story and I had a taste of the writer’s prose. Esther Greenwood was a junior in college (somewhere in Massachusetts, never disclosed) on a summer work program at Ladies Day magazine in NYC. She was a straight-A student who didn’t have confidence in herself. She constantly questions her ability to write even though she won a grant to be where she was...she is always debriefing her sexual desires...should I stay a virgin or not. “I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.” Long-term relations with anyone are a no-no. She prefers to see everyone as a hypocrite. When her summer job is over and she goes home, she is blindsided by her mother, “I think I should tell you right away, you didn’t make that writing course.” The air punched out of my stomach. “All through June, the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve…”

If you want to find out what happens next, you will have to buy your own copy. My lips are sealed. Oh, I also forgot to mention the wonderful side characters, such as Doreen, Jay Cee, Betsey, Buddy, and Joan. It reads like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, but out of the asylum. The following is the last taste of Sylvia’s prose, only because I can remember my first run down a ski slope (1976) without useful lessons: “The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool-to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down...fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. I measured the distance to Buddy (who was waiting at the bottom for her) with my eye. I aimed straight down. I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts…” After she crashed at the bottom, she bravely told Buddy, “I’m going to do it again.” Buddy said, “No, you’re not, your leg’s broken in two places.” HaHa.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: In London on 2/11/1963, Sylvia Plath blocked the bottoms of all the doors in her kitchen with tape, towels, and cloths, stuck her head in the oven, and turned on the gas. She was only 30 years old. 

She didn’t live to be famous. She died one month after The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems.

A famous quote from Sylvia is: “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”

‘Nuff said.

 

TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS

 This special signed edition available through B&N was supposed to be YA king Christopher Paolini’s first adult novel. It read like a normal 12-18-year-old YA novel to me. I felt hemmed in once I started to read this 878-page tome and I hate to stop reading once I start a novel. While the novel does have mostly adult characters, there are almost no sexual innuendos. It reads like a cross between Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy...a little too silly for my taste. In a sci/fi novel, I prefer the antagonist be as close to a single entity as possible, such as in the Alien series or in The Day The Earth Stood Still. I don’t need to read a book with a variety of foolish characters in impossible situations; such as the movie Abbott & Costello go to Mars (1953) or Spider-man or Batman novels. Now after that somewhat rant you must think that I hated this novel...not so book lover! I hate being deceived. When I read the teaser inside of the dust jacket, and it says, “Kira Navarez dreamed of life on new worlds...now she’s awakened a nightmare.” That’s false advertising...believe me, it was not that dramatic. Was it well written? Yes. Was it as teased? No. 

Kira Navarez and the company she works for were finishing up its survey of Adrasteia, an earth-size moon, light-years away from earth. On the last night of their mission, they celebrated their departure in the mess hall. While Kira and her fiance, Alan, were at the punch bowl, the expedition boss cleared a path to her. He said, “We have a problem: one of the drones down south went dead.” Kira said, “So? Send another one.” Her boss replied, “They’re too far away, and we don’t have time to print a replacement. Last thing the drone detected was some organic material along the coastline. Needs to be checked before we leave.” The moon they were on had to be cleared before the expected colonist could arrive. Kira would have to shuttle down in the morning and check it out. Kira and Alan spent the night together before Kira’s mission in the morning. That night, Alan asked Kira if she would be his wife. She said, “Yes. Thousand times yes.”

The organic material in question was on the top of a hill a few hundred meters to the south of her shuttle. “At the top of the hill, she found a flat spread of rock scored with deep grooves from the last planetary glaciation...biologically, there wasn’t much interest on Adrasteia...still, the absence of more developed forms of life was a plus when it came to terraforming: it left the moon a lump of raw clay, suitable for remolding however the company, and the settlers, saw fit.”

She found a rock formation that looked like the result of a meteor strike or a volcanic eruption. She then fell into the hole. “Kira lay where she was, stunned. In front of her, all she saw was rock and shadow.” She was lying on a pile of stone rubble, covered in dust. When her head cleared, she realized that she fell into a room. It had to be made by intelligent aliens. The dust started to cover her body like a series of tight, ever-shifting bands. “Outside the suit, the dust flowed over her visor, plunging her into darkness, Inside the suit, the tendrils wormed their way over her shoulder and across her neck and chest...she opened her mouth to scream as the torrent of dust rushed inside of her. And all went blank.”

The tight suit of tendrils and dust is the focus of the novel (that could have been finished in 350 pages). What is it? Is the suit good or bad? It is capable of defending her in any attack, but possessing it causes ungodly damage to many planets and aliens. Why does all of the universe seem to want the suit? Good luck finding that out...I was on page 646 and still didn’t know. The author has to learn how to leak out a little information in order to keep the reader interested...but alas, he didn't.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

Comment: I’m not into exotic-looking aliens like you would see in a Star Wars movie. That’s how I visualized the different types of aliens in Paolini’s space opera. Give me a good ole Robot like Robby or Gork anytime before an Ewok, Chewbacca or God forbid...a Jar Jar Binks! 

In Larry Niven’s classic 1985 novel, Footfall, the antagonists threatening Earth are the Fithps, baby elephant-looking creatures with multiple trunks. Why is this monster okay? Because it’s a single entity. No other creature appears in the novel. See my review of this wonderful story on 3/30/2011.