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sonyaboyle's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
stellef's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
madeleinegeorge's review against another edition
5.0
A delightful and poignant collection. Margaret Atwood is correct when, in her essay "Poet's Prose", she categorizes this anthology as a gateway towards better understanding of Plath herself, a Charonic ferrying towards the heart of the poet. Ted Hughes, in his introduction, is also correct when he lightly condemns Plath for her life's pursuit of short fiction and journalism, hoping to pander to the literarily lucrative sectors of the craft; he says it was a disservice to her true medium, to the genius of her poetry. These things are true, but it is important to note the justice that her prose brings to the reality her poems sing of. The same impulses towards detail, toward personification and delicate description, are seen in her short stories and diary entries alike.
Despite my best intentions, I find the latter to be the most compelling. Cambridge Notes, February 1956 is as enthralling a narrative as it is momentous. At the time of its writing, Sylvia was nursing the last of a bitter and drawn-out breakup to Richard Sassoon, then in France. She is as fascinated with his domination over her psyche as she is with the man himself. She laments that her potential for love is too much, has been too much, will always be. She wants a love to write about, to bolster soaring poetry and smashing fiction. She wants to toast bread in the morning, raise a child. She assumes a kind of grief over these things, which, to her, are irrevocably lost to her intensity, to a depth of feeling and care the world simply cannot match. She resolves to live a life of statue-esque stoicism over the carefree and love-able warmblooded people around her, accepting the task of caring for her stone self alone. It is slightly humorous, of course, because we know that on the 25th, at the St. Botolph's Review launch party, Ted Hughes will meet Sylvia Plath and the English-speaking literary world will be forever altered.
My favorite of the short stories, besides the eponymous recount of her stay at McLean's, is Stone Boy with Dolphin , which is a thinly-veiled telling of that aforementioned February night at Cambridge. She paints each revolving scene with such vividness it is impossible not to feel the burn of snow against her ankles, the loneliness that dogs her in a room of people, the flush and panic and utter joy of her introduction to the man she would marry. As much as can be said about the cruelty, the carelessness, the immaturity, and fickleness of Ted Hughes, there is no denying that he was the love of Plath's life, and she of his. He would be nothing without her. He knew this. And, despite their destructive and fatal ending, the years they spent together were euphoric: happiness past the point of poetry. Bliss beyond belief, beyond capture. Etc. Remembering that, and foregoing the usual devastation and anger that plagues the remembrance of their relationship, makes this story not only readable but redemptive, and joy-filled.
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams , an extended metaphor not only for mental illness and its often barbaric and traumatizing treatment, but also for writing and the creative life itself, is particularly strong. It lacks the carefully constructed realism of Plath's other short stories, launching itself to an elevated plane of wild imagery and allegory. It is fast-paced and captivating, making up for its sometimes overly convoluted circumstance.
Johnny Panic is rich and complex, particularly rewarding to those who have a solid grasp on Plath's personal history, and the place and time out of which each story emerged. Reading chronologically backwards in time, one gets the feeling of wading backwards through the impulses, fears, and desires of the author, through experience and development. We arrive, as we must, at Among the Bumble-bees , before "Daddy" and "The Colossus". Atwood was spot-on in her diagnosis, that it emerges like the "final, gold-crowned skeleton at the bottom of the tomb-- the king all those others were killed to protect. Which it is."
Plath brings us, as always, vital and invigorating work. An absorbing and intoxicating collection.
Essentials:
"Her real creation was her own image, so that all her writings appear like notes and jottings directing attention towards that central problem-- herself." Ted Hughes, Introduction
"As from a star, I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over." Ocean 1212-W
"[The novelist's] business is Time. The way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays and double-exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all the time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer." A Comparison
"Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion. [...] Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand." The Shadow
"I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His Word charges and illumines the universe. His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart. He forgets not his own." Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
"She begged, wordless, [...]: let something happen. Let something happen. Something terrible, something bloody. Something to end this endless flaking snowdrift of airmail letters, of blank pages turning into library books. How we go to waste, how we go squandering ourselves on air. Let me put on that red cloak of doom. Let me leave my mark." Stone Boy with Dolphin
"Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teeth marks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live." ibid
"Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thundercrack of judgment. There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear." Cambridge Notes, February 1956
"I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak. I feel like Lazarus: Being dead, I rose up again, and even resort to the mere sensation value of being suicidal, of getting so close, of coming out of the grave with the scars and marring mark on my cheek." ibid
"I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down." ibid
"Look, with love and faith, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously." ibid
"I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love I can live with. [...] I can't bear to think of this potential for loving and giving going brown and sere in me. Yet the choice is so important, it frightens me a little. A lot."
"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. [...] If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine." ibid
"She had fought back to darkness and lost. They had jolted her back into the hell of her dead body. They had raised her like Lazarus from the mindless dead, corrupt already with the breath of the grave, sallow-skinned, with purple bruises swelling." Tongues of Stone
Despite my best intentions, I find the latter to be the most compelling. Cambridge Notes, February 1956 is as enthralling a narrative as it is momentous. At the time of its writing, Sylvia was nursing the last of a bitter and drawn-out breakup to Richard Sassoon, then in France. She is as fascinated with his domination over her psyche as she is with the man himself. She laments that her potential for love is too much, has been too much, will always be. She wants a love to write about, to bolster soaring poetry and smashing fiction. She wants to toast bread in the morning, raise a child. She assumes a kind of grief over these things, which, to her, are irrevocably lost to her intensity, to a depth of feeling and care the world simply cannot match. She resolves to live a life of statue-esque stoicism over the carefree and love-able warmblooded people around her, accepting the task of caring for her stone self alone. It is slightly humorous, of course, because we know that on the 25th, at the St. Botolph's Review launch party, Ted Hughes will meet Sylvia Plath and the English-speaking literary world will be forever altered.
My favorite of the short stories, besides the eponymous recount of her stay at McLean's, is Stone Boy with Dolphin , which is a thinly-veiled telling of that aforementioned February night at Cambridge. She paints each revolving scene with such vividness it is impossible not to feel the burn of snow against her ankles, the loneliness that dogs her in a room of people, the flush and panic and utter joy of her introduction to the man she would marry. As much as can be said about the cruelty, the carelessness, the immaturity, and fickleness of Ted Hughes, there is no denying that he was the love of Plath's life, and she of his. He would be nothing without her. He knew this. And, despite their destructive and fatal ending, the years they spent together were euphoric: happiness past the point of poetry. Bliss beyond belief, beyond capture. Etc. Remembering that, and foregoing the usual devastation and anger that plagues the remembrance of their relationship, makes this story not only readable but redemptive, and joy-filled.
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams , an extended metaphor not only for mental illness and its often barbaric and traumatizing treatment, but also for writing and the creative life itself, is particularly strong. It lacks the carefully constructed realism of Plath's other short stories, launching itself to an elevated plane of wild imagery and allegory. It is fast-paced and captivating, making up for its sometimes overly convoluted circumstance.
Johnny Panic is rich and complex, particularly rewarding to those who have a solid grasp on Plath's personal history, and the place and time out of which each story emerged. Reading chronologically backwards in time, one gets the feeling of wading backwards through the impulses, fears, and desires of the author, through experience and development. We arrive, as we must, at Among the Bumble-bees , before "Daddy" and "The Colossus". Atwood was spot-on in her diagnosis, that it emerges like the "final, gold-crowned skeleton at the bottom of the tomb-- the king all those others were killed to protect. Which it is."
Plath brings us, as always, vital and invigorating work. An absorbing and intoxicating collection.
Essentials:
"Her real creation was her own image, so that all her writings appear like notes and jottings directing attention towards that central problem-- herself." Ted Hughes, Introduction
"As from a star, I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over." Ocean 1212-W
"[The novelist's] business is Time. The way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays and double-exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all the time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer." A Comparison
"Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion. [...] Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand." The Shadow
"I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His Word charges and illumines the universe. His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart. He forgets not his own." Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
"She begged, wordless, [...]: let something happen. Let something happen. Something terrible, something bloody. Something to end this endless flaking snowdrift of airmail letters, of blank pages turning into library books. How we go to waste, how we go squandering ourselves on air. Let me put on that red cloak of doom. Let me leave my mark." Stone Boy with Dolphin
"Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teeth marks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live." ibid
"Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thundercrack of judgment. There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear." Cambridge Notes, February 1956
"I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak. I feel like Lazarus: Being dead, I rose up again, and even resort to the mere sensation value of being suicidal, of getting so close, of coming out of the grave with the scars and marring mark on my cheek." ibid
"I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down." ibid
"Look, with love and faith, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously." ibid
"I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love I can live with. [...] I can't bear to think of this potential for loving and giving going brown and sere in me. Yet the choice is so important, it frightens me a little. A lot."
"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. [...] If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine." ibid
"She had fought back to darkness and lost. They had jolted her back into the hell of her dead body. They had raised her like Lazarus from the mindless dead, corrupt already with the breath of the grave, sallow-skinned, with purple bruises swelling." Tongues of Stone
revisorium's review against another edition
5.0
A really beautiful set of short stories and writings. I particularly liked the Fifty-Ninth Bear and Sweetie and the Gutter Men. Plath had a real way of understanding people and nature and her words are just so elegant and smooth and beautiful.
aleksandraborenovic's review against another edition
5.0
2⭐ - Камени дечак с делфином
3⭐ - Орао од петнаест долара, Ћерке улице Блосом, Педесет девети медвед, Мајке, Океан 1212-W, Поглед на Оксбоу, Колачић и лимар
3,5⭐ - У планинама
4⭐ - Џони Паника и Библија снова, Кутија за жеље, Снег у Лондону, Недеља код Минтонових, Супермен и ново зимско одело Поле Браун, Сви наши драги покојници, Једног дана у јуну, Језици од камена
5⭐ - Америко! Америко!, Дан када је умро господин Прескот, Поређење, Контекст, Иницијација, Дан успеха, Зелена стена, Међу бумбарима, Удовица Мангада, Сенка, Мери Вентура и Девето Краљевство
О свакој причи из ове прелепе збирке бих могла да причам сатима, ако не и данима, али у својим рецензијама не волим да претерујем у дужини. Оно што је заједничко већини прича јесте симбол мора и океана, људски односи, менталитет једног друштва, догађаји из детињства, носталгија, одрастање, а с времена на време појављују се и ситуације које говоре о положају жена и њиховим међусобним односима. Силвија делује као списатељица тренутака, јер успева да ухвати ситне мисли и догађаје које многи од нас доживе, али их ми нисмо могли тако дубоко анализирати и схватити њихову значајност за наш живот. Мислим да је овим причама Силвија успела управо то, а са тиме се свакодневно боре многи уметници.
3⭐ - Орао од петнаест долара, Ћерке улице Блосом, Педесет девети медвед, Мајке, Океан 1212-W, Поглед на Оксбоу, Колачић и лимар
3,5⭐ - У планинама
4⭐ - Џони Паника и Библија снова, Кутија за жеље, Снег у Лондону, Недеља код Минтонових, Супермен и ново зимско одело Поле Браун, Сви наши драги покојници, Једног дана у јуну, Језици од камена
5⭐ - Америко! Америко!, Дан када је умро господин Прескот, Поређење, Контекст, Иницијација, Дан успеха, Зелена стена, Међу бумбарима, Удовица Мангада, Сенка, Мери Вентура и Девето Краљевство
О свакој причи из ове прелепе збирке бих могла да причам сатима, ако не и данима, али у својим рецензијама не волим да претерујем у дужини. Оно што је заједничко већини прича јесте симбол мора и океана, људски односи, менталитет једног друштва, догађаји из детињства, носталгија, одрастање, а с времена на време појављују се и ситуације које говоре о положају жена и њиховим међусобним односима. Силвија делује као списатељица тренутака, јер успева да ухвати ситне мисли и догађаје које многи од нас доживе, али их ми нисмо могли тако дубоко анализирати и схватити њихову значајност за наш живот. Мислим да је овим причама Силвија успела управо то, а са тиме се свакодневно боре многи уметници.
friss_zucker's review against another edition
challenging
funny
lighthearted
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
missbookiverse's review against another edition
4.0
A lovely collection of some of Plath's short stories with some additional essays and notebook pages. Not all of these stories are exceptional but I enjoy her elegant writing so much and her stories are much more approachable than her poems. They are often a mix of domestic life, minute observations, and character studies, sometimes with a little twist at the end that reminded me of Shirley Jackson. From what I know about Plath's life I assume that many of her stories are highly autobiographical, so I think they'd make for an interesting comparison with her diaries. That being said, I must admit that I didn't really care for most of the notebook excerpts because they (obviously) don't have the narrative guidance her written-for-publication texts have. But the stories definitely dominate this collection, so if you generally enjoy Plath's prose, this is worth the read.
linsobsessedwithartandbooks's review against another edition
5.0
i got grazed by a car while holding this book so i think i might be the next victim of sylvia plaths curse