2017 Challenge - The Bell Jar

Book 5 (March, Mad People)

The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath (read by Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Reason for Reading: The Bell Jar was one of the first entries on the original list, recommended by Sara, and the month's overarching theme of Mad People was suggested by Abi to link it with Trainspotting. This was a book that I went into pretty much blind. I knew that it was a novel by the poet Sylvia Plath and that it was called The Bell Jar, and that was about it.

Esther Greenwood is an academically successful girl, whose life seems to have peaked. Having earned the chance to spend a month in New York as one of twelve guest editors on a magazine she finds herself at a loss in the big city, and then unable to find herself once she returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide, before slowly returning to health in a private asylum. The book's first person narrative follows Esther's skewed and unreliable perspective as she attributes sinister and selfish objectives to the people around her, as viewed through the distorting glass and suffocating air of the bell jar which separates her from normality.

The book depicts a world and a mental health system far removed from our own, despite the relatively short gap between Plath's time and ours. With her country tan fading Esther calls herself 'yellow as a chinaman,' and her first psychiatrist assigns her crude ECT after two sessions. While I am approaching this challenge as a means of exploring other viewpoints, however, I was surprised how much I recognised in Plath's semi-autobiographical narrative from the time of my own lowest ebb. I was never so bad that I could not read, but the sense of that distorting glass is one I once knew well.

The Audible release of The Bell Jar is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose cool, almost detached delivery renders the mesmerising language of the novel all the more affecting. And it is the language that is perhaps the most remarkable thing in this novel. Like the superb translated text of 100 Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar contains not a sentence that is purely functional, not a word that is present simply to convey a single, dry piece of information. The prose itself is art, beyond its value as a medium for the story.