by Janet Malcolm
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From Publishers Weekly
This exceptional first novel, shot through with a fierce poetic luminosity that almost matches that of Moses's much-written-about subject, covers the last few months of the poet's life as she cares for her sick children in the middle of a brutal London winter, struggling to write her last poems and recover from the defection of husband Ted Hughes. Moses is frank, in a long afterword, about her sources-which include Plath's letters and journals-and about what she has made up or merely surmised. But the key question is whether the book succeeds as a compelling piece of fiction, and the answer is that it does, triumphantly. Moses moves deftly back and forth in time, from the couple's last months in their beloved but moldering Devonshire hideaway through Plath's first suspicions of Hughes's infidelities to her arrival in London. Moses catches the quality of English life, particularly its austere inconveniences and its moody weather, with remarkable fluency, and her habitation of Plath's body and mind feels complete. At the same time, she offers scenes that show how awkward and bloody minded the poet could sometimes be. It is not a sentimental book, but rather one that evokes Plath's fierce joy in words and images and her huge motherly courage in the face of crippling adversity, with lacerating episodes like the one in which she makes a desperate call from a phone box in the rain while her children peer in at her uncomprehendingly. In the end one wonders not how Plath came to kill herself but how she survived so long. This beautifully written novel may offend literary purists, but most readers will find it moving almost beyond words.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Suffering artists are the sainted martyrs of our times, and novelists love to speculate about iconic figures such as painter Frida Kahlo and poet Sylvia Plath. Already the subject of Emma Tennant's novel Sylvia and Ted (2001), Plath has now inspired first-time novelist Moses, who presents an exquisite interpretation of the final months in the brilliant but angst-riven poet's short life, focusing particularly on the collapse of her marriage to poet Ted Hughes. Moses is so fluent in Plath's swordlike language and mythic imagery, and so attuned to the dire complications of a love match between two intense poets, she writes with a cleansing purity, free of judgment and rich in intuition. In her finest passages, she reanimates the all-too-quickly defiled Eden the two poets attempted to create at Court Green, Plath's feverish and indelible poetic output, and her manic domestic industry, her muscular mothering, gardening, cooking, beekeeping, painting, and sewing. Plath held herself to impossibly high standards, and Moses traces the source of Plath's unsustainable drive and sensitivity and their tragic consequences with empathic artistry. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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GOLD SEEPING UNDER HER EYELIDS. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
GOLD SEEPING UNDER HER EYELIDS. Read the first page
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