
The Bell Jar
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Narrated by:
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Maggie Gyllenhaal
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By:
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Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful but slowly going under - maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
©1971 Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. Copyright renewed 1998 (P)2016 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...




















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A classic done right
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The second half of the book is much rougher. Esther begins to come apart, and there is no room for denial on anyone's part. Her mother tries very hard to provide for Esther, and to get the "right" kinds of treatment for her. Some of what she gets is the perfectly wrong treatment, i.e., hospitalization and shock treatments at a private hospital run by a psychiatrist named Dr. Gordon. While it is true that electroshock treatment can be helpful in the cases of treatment-resistant severe depression, the experience that Esther endures is so painful and so intimately described that one can just barely listen to the words without yelling "Stop!" at the callow psychiatrist. During my training I actually administered EST at a Veteran's Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina. Nothing will make you think a thousand times about its so-called efficacy as having to administer this awful procedure to a patient. Even when the process was improved to the point where a grand mal seizure was suppressed, no one could mistake the profound shock, literally and figuratively, that the patient was going through. Needless to say, the treatments didn't work for Esther, and so she continued down the slippery slope into the abyss.
The good news about this audiobook is Maggie Gyllenhaal. She is one of my favorite actors on the screen. I didn't know that she narrated audiobooks, but I am thrilled about it. If you saw her and James Spader in the deeply troubling movie "Secretary," you hold the image of Maggie portraying one of the most challenging parts anywhere in either literature or movies. I won't go on about this except to say that the relationship between the two leads (Spader is a lawyer who is his usual extremely creepy self, and Maggie is his secretary) quickly progresses from brand new to a spanking connection. Quite literally. Maggie Gyllenhaal pulls this off perfectly, with her extraordinarily expressive face and her stellar abilities as an actor. She applies these same skills, without the visuals, in The Bell Jar, and I think that I will remember this performance for as long as I will remember the tortured young woman in "Secretary." From this point forward, I will gladly listen to almost anything that Maggie narrates. Jake may get more work, but IMHO Maggie is the superior sibling by leaps and bounds. As Esther descends, Maggie's depiction of the awful metamorphosis is spellbinding. Even though we know that the end is coming, somehow the nutty optimist in all of us keeps hoping that she will by some miracle be saved. We think: she's just too good and sensitive a person to die like this.
Buy this book. Although it is quite difficult in some parts, the sheer talent on view, so to speak, is towering.
A remarkable achievement; the perfect narrator.
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Why All The Hype?
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THE ANNOYING MUSIC
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Everything was great except… that music?
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The prose is lyrical, the work of a great artist.
Outstanding
Esther Greenwood, unforgettable hero
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Poetic in nature, well done like a oven top Salmon
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Loved Maggie' reading.
Wonderfully written. I chuckled, I felt sad, I didn't know what to think sometimes.
I felt I coul felt I could see the world through her eyes!
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Perfection
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Only Sylvia Plath Book I've Ever Read
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