Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath ReviewMost readers who come to this book will already be familiar with the basic story of poet Sylvia Plath, her doomed marriage to author Ted Hughes, and her suicide at age thirty. In "Wintering," one of the Ariel poems, written in the four months before her death in February, 1963, Plath depicts the "real and bloody sacrifice" of this marriage, according to author Kate Moses, "not bodies piled in a mountain pass but her life...the truths fanning out a page at a time."
Kate Moses recreates the heart, soul, and psyche of Sylvia Plath in her extraordinary debut novel, Wintering. In preparation for this novel, Moses read virtually every piece of Plath's writing, and most, if not all, of the resource material about Plath. So completely has she distilled this material and incorporated it into the book that the reader feels as if s/he is actually entering the mind of Plath, a Plath who is speaking and reminiscing, conjuring up events, aching, dreaming, and hoping. Astonishingly, Moses achieves this without ever deviating from a third person narrative and without ever speaking as Plath herself.
Organizing the novel around the poems which make up the Ariel collection, all written in the last four months of Plath's life, Moses creates a fictional narrative using as chapter titles the names of poems from Ariel, each chapter including some of the imagery from these poems and the subject matter from Plath's life which parallels them. Moses does this naturally, without calling attention to this specific image in that poem, or this event at such and such a point in Plath's life, simply letting the narrative unfold in parallel with the essence and imagery of the poems, a process which feels, remarkably, as if it's unfolding of its own accord. The poems which serve as the impetus to each chapter live on after forty years, continuing to speak to the reader across time and space, and Moses wisely keeps her own narrative in the present tense, suiting her style to that of Plath's poetry. Like the poems, the chapters sieze on images and events in random order, making Moses's achievement in creating a real and memorable narrative out of the creative chaos truly daunting.
This not really a novel about Plath, so much as it is a novel in which Plath reveals herself, something she does to even greater effect in her poetry. Because of this, I would strongly urge the reader to find a copy of Plath's Ariel to read in concert with Moses's Wintering. Images from the poems take on added significance when they are repeated and expanded in Moses's narrative; likewise, events from the narrative shed light on some of the intense but sometimes unfocused feeling in the poems. When one knows about the lives of Plath and Ted Hughes and can see the significance in their lives of the repeating images of bees, apples, the moon, food, the earth, and life cycles, their symbolic importance in both the poems and narrative grows, and the reader gains new insights. This is a remarkable novel based on the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath, one which will undoubtedly bring new readers and new appreciation to Plath on the fortieth anniversary of her death at age thirty. Mary WhippleWintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath Overview

Want to learn more information about Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now