"The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

I listened to The Bell Jar in an audio format. It is a fairly short novel so it was perfect for listening during my commute to and from work. I've been curious about Plath's only novel for some time and decided to pick it up in my attempt to close the gaps in my reading of literary classics. In addition, at the end of 2016, a friend of our family was dealing with a terrible tragedy: their 22-year old daughter, a senior at an Ivy League school, committed a suicide. I think this tragic event influenced the choice of this book as I was trying to wrap my head around mental illness, depression and suicidal tendencies.

In The Bell Jar the main heroine Esther Greenwood, a brilliant and successful college student who wins an internship at a prestigious magazine in New York City, begins to slowly fall apart. She stops eating, reading, sleeping and becomes more and more depressed. She feels trapped "under a bell jar" suffocating in apathy, despair and utter senselessness of it all. In addition to detailing Esther's gradual decent into clinical depression, the novel is filled with feminist themes. Marriage, sex, childbirth, career opportunities are frankly and openly discussed. Esther, in whose voice the novel is written, blatantly exposes gender disparities, and even though a lot of her thoughts need to be taken through the prism of her mental illness, she is right on point in the feminist themes. It sort of reminds me of holy fools who could tell the truth under the guise of insanity.

Plath's writing is unbelievable. Her choice of words is so precise that the descriptions are starkly vivid and characters real and ready to jump off the page. Her novel is deeply autobiographical. She basically described her own battle with clinical depression, and even though her heroine Esther does get out from under the bell jar at the end of the book, there is this dark premonition that the bell jar is not gone. It simply lifted for a while, but might at any moment come crashing down trapping her once again.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the book immensely. I think it tackles important subjects that are still relevant today. 5 out 5 stars.