Red Comet - Heather Clarke 3.75/5

[Nicole D.]

Dear God, I am completely spent. One more book on mental health and I'm going to need some therapy! (audio 45 hours 27 minutes.)

Sylvia Plath led a short well-documented life. What I find most interesting about Plath is the way people get obsessed with her. (I am one of them.) There are SO many Plath biographies, and let's face it - people are all working from the same source material.

It makes it really hard to have anything new to say, though this book promised to do that. Ultimately, it did deliver, but it was a long time coming. Mostly, if you've read other Plath biographies, The Bell Jar, Letters Home, and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath you know 95% of what is in this book. What you may not know exactly, you know peripherally - because nothing changes what happened, only how some of the others documented Plath in their own letters and journals. I'm not sure what I was expecting.

If you only read one book on Plath, this would be a good one. It's comprehensive.

True confession time - I don't "get" poetry. At. All. I try so hard to read and absorb Plath's poems and they mostly go right over my head. (Though I really enjoy listening to her reading her own poems, a bunch of which are available on Spotify. Who new?) This book contained a lot of literary criticism and that is not something I enjoy. To me it's like the pretentious guy in the museum looking at a painting of a red ball and explaining to the crowd "What the artist was trying to say was life on a fixed income is hard." If I don't get it, it's my problem. Don't explain it to me. There was a lot of explaining the poetry.

This book was exceptionally well-researched, and well-written. What it was not, as per usual, was well-edited. There was a lot of repetition. Perhaps you notice that more when you listen vs. read. I feel like there were about 50 mentions to the effect of "and that's when she wrote Lady Lazurus." I know that's not the case, because I also thought she used the word "elegiac" every other word and I searched Kindle and turned out it was only 10.
But really, some critical editing was in order.

Overall, relatively easy to get through in spite of the length, new enough information available and you know, more Sylvia for those who need it. I think I'm well-sated for now.

Hardcover of this book has artwork I understand, which would be cool to have so I'll probably buy it at some point. If I'd been reading the print copy, I can tell you I would have skipped a LOT of it.