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Title: Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Jillian Becker ISBN: 0-312-31598-8 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Too little, too late
Comment: What happened with this book? As other reviewers have noted, it is very slight -- less than 100 pages, almost pocket-book size.
The author never tells us exactly how she first became acquainted with Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, and it would have been interesting to know how this striking and charismatic literary couple impressed her.
There's no context for her own part in the story -- what was Becker doing at that time? Had she begun to write professionally? She mentions giving up the notion of writing poetry when humbled by her reading of the work Plath showed her, but doesn't tell us much about her own ambitions, milieu or activities. Becker's husband Gerry plays an important role in the narrative, helping to take care of Plath, even driving her home on the night of her suicide, but we aren't told whether he too was a writer, artist or other brand of intellectual, nor whether the Beckers stayed married nor if he is even still living.
There is some unforgettable new material in Becker's account of the gathering in a pub after Plath's burial, which puts Ted Hughes in a bad light -- interesting, considering the recent rehabilitation of his reputation vis-a-vis Plath in Diane Middlebrook's "Her Husband" and Elaine Feinstein's biography of Hughes.
Unfortunately, Becker probably waited too long to tell her own version of the last events of Plath's life. Too often, she'll say that she doesn't remember what they talked about on some occasion -- honest, but frustrating.
When I finished the book, I started paging through it again, as if I thought I would find the rest of the story this time. Becker could have given us an authoritative glimpse of the young creative people she and Plath lived among in the London of that time -- "a string of luminaries about to be switched on" is her nice phrase for them -- but she seems to have been in a hurry to get the bare facts down and to move on.
She writes that she was moved to write the memoir because some of Plath's biographers had interviewed her, then used little or nothing of what she had to tell them. Where is all that misundertood or unused material? I felt that Giving Up had the potential to be a better, fuller book, but something -- time, guilt or disinclination to the memoir genre -- got in the author's way.
Rating: 2
Summary: too much the writer and too little the friend
Comment: Becker does not seem an empathic, loyal friend of the late poet.
She uses gimcrackery effects to sell better her story:
"The exaggeration taken with her suicide makes it too probable that her final act was(...) dedicated to Posterity. Too much the writer and too little the mother, did she gas herself because the story she invented for her life demanded that ending?"
What about a deeply suffering woman, likely with post partum depression in the last months of her life, who was desperate?
Rating: 1
Summary: Jillian, my dear -- No More!
Comment: In which a recent acquaintance of Sylvia Plath's attempts to comfort and protect the poet from herself during her last horrible days on this earth.
There is much that is scalding and unnecessary in this thin little book. It repeats so much of what we already know -- perhaps from Becker herself -- and is flawed by the author's insistent need to defend herself against (whose?) assumption that she should or could have "done something" to protect Plath from her compulsive need to kill herself. Well, maybe she could have or should have, but she didn't, as didn't many who knew her far better than Becker did, so there's really no need for all the justifications.
The lack of insight displayed here suggests that while Becker might have been stung by real or imagined criticism, she has done little in the last 40 years to understand the hopeless circumstances in which she found herself.
The fact that she barely knew Planth, but found it necessary to blather about it 40 years later, makes me wonder if there isn't a wee bit of the "cashing in" afoot on the part of the author.
Read the day after finishing Middlebrook's marvelous book on this subject, "Her Husband," I found it a total waste of paper.
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Title: Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage by Diane Middlebrook ISBN: 0670031879 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Wintering : A Novel of Sylvia Plath by KATE MOSES ISBN: 1400035007 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath, Karen V. Kukil ISBN: 0385720254 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 17 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman ISBN: 0750934220 Publisher: Sutton Publishing Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title:Sylvia ASIN: B00005JMJD Publisher: Universal Studios Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $23.47 |
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