The journals show the breathless adolescent obsessed with her burgeoning sexuality, the serious university student competing for the highest grades while engaging in the human merry-go-round of 1950s dating, the graduate year spent at Cambridge University where Plath encountered Ted Hughes. Her version of their relationship (dating is definitely not the appropriate term) is a necessary, and deeply painful, complement to Birthday Letters. On March 10, 1956, Plath writes:
Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.Plath's documentation of the two years the couple spent in the U.S. teaching and writing explicitly highlights the dilemma of the late-1950s woman--still swaddled in expectations of domesticity, yet attempting to forge her own independent professional and personal life. This period also reveals in detail the therapy sessions in which Plath lets loose her antipathy for her mother and her grief at her father's death when she was 8--a contrast to the bright, all-American persona she presented to her mother in the correspondence that was published as Letters Home. The journals also feature some notable omissions. Plath understandably skirted over her breakdown and attempted suicide during the summer of 1953, though she was to anatomize the events minutely in her novel The Bell Jar.
Fragments of diaries exist after 1959, which saw the couple's return to England and rural retreat in Devon, the birth of their two children, and their separation in late 1962. An extended piece on the illness and death of an elderly neighbor during this period is particularly affecting and was later turned into the poem "Berck-Plage." Much has been made of the "lost diaries" that Plath kept until her suicide--one simply appears to have vanished, the other Hughes burned after her death. It would seem rapacious to wish for more details of her despair in her final days, however. It is crystallized in the poems that became Ariel, and this is what the voice of her journals ultimately send the reader back to. Sylvia Plath's life has for too long been obfuscated by anecdote, distorting her major contribution to 20th-century literature. As she wrote in "Kindness": "The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it." --Catherine Taylor
]]>Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.
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To the same place, the same face, the same brute Drawn from two separate recordings--one while accompanied by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, in 1958, and one conducted shortly after their separation in 1962, The Voice of the Poet includes a companion book containing the text of each poem, as well as an introduction by editor J.D. McClatchy. Listen to Plath read "Lorelei." Visit our audio help page for more information. (Running time: 1 hour, 1 cassette) --Rob McDonald
Die Erzählungen Zungen aus Stein sind verstörende Kleinodien vom Heranwachsen junger Frauen, ihrer Traurigkeit, dem grausamen Schulterror und schließlich den Ritualen in der Welt zwischen Mann und Frau. Wem es diese eigenartige und zerrissene Frau angetan hat, dem seien weiterhin die Briefe nach Hause empfohlen, eine Auswahl aus dem riesigen Briefwechsel mit ihrer Mutter. Und -- nehmen Sie doch einmal das Porträt der Autorin zur Hand. Erzählt dieses Gesicht nicht schon ihre ganze Geschichte? --Ravi Unger
]]>Auch in der Kurzgeschichte Nomade von Carson McCullers arbeitet Hannelore Hoger das beängstigende Gefühl der Vergänglich- und Einsamkeit leise, aber nachhaltig heraus. Die Beerdigung des geliebten, aber irgendwie ,vergessenen' Vaters, vor allem aber die Begegnung mit der Ex-Frau und ihrem ,geordneten!' Familienleben mit Kindern lösen bei dem 38-jährigen Protagonisten eine Krise aus. In Hogers einfühlsamer Lesung glaubt man seinen „leisen Neid, die Reue und Sehnsucht“ zu spüren. Die Zeit, die sich nicht mehr zurückdrehen lässt, kommt in einer von seiner Ex-Frau gespielten Bach-Melodie sehr schön zum Ausdruck. Sie begleitet ihn zurück nach Paris, dahin wo er zu Hause sein sollte!
Carson McCullers, 1917 in Columbus (Georgia) geboren, wollte eigentlich Pianistin werden. Ihr Startkapital von 500 Dollar verschwand jedoch, gleich nachdem sie in New York angekommen war! So musste sie sich durchschlagen. Anerkennung brachte ihr das Schreiben: ihr Erstling Das Herz ist ein einsamer Jäger wurde gleich ein Erfolg. Das Leben der begabten Frau war von Krankheit und Einsamkeit geprägt. McCullers starb 1967 in New York. In ihrer Kurzgeschichte Ein Baum, ein Felsen, eine Wolke erzählt ein alter Mann einem Zeitungsjungen von der Liebe. Die Sprecherin lässt in unserem Kopf den ,verwirrten' Mann, der elf Jahre seiner Frau nachjagte lebendig werden. Ihre Interpretation vermittelt die Einsamkeit des Alten, der an der Liebe zerbrochen ist, und dessen System darin besteht, alles fremd zu lassen und alles zu lieben. Die Leere, die den Mann umgibt -- in der Stimme Hannelore Hogers klingt sie weiter. Und der Junge, dem der alte Mann das alles erzählt, versteht ihn nicht…
Fazit: Drei Liebesgeschichten von zwei großartigen Schriftstellerinnen! Ein Lob an die sensible, sehr professionelle Lesung von Hannelore Hoger, die hier mindestens genauso beeindruckend ist wie als Kommissarin Bella Block!
Lesung, Spieldauer: ca. 78 Minuten, 1 CD. Mit Booklet. -- culture.text
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