Life's a Bitch

The YA Book Club at Borders will be held for the first time on Friday, March 14 at 7-10pm,  at Starbucks, Borders, The Curve, Mutiara Damansara, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The session is open to 14-21-year-olds. All registered participants will receive free complimentary tall coffee of the day and a Borders Gift Certificate.

For enquiries call 03 7725 9303 or email [email protected].

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is the featured book.

Discussing a descent into madness

Tots to Teens
By DAPHNE LEE

I’D like to give Borders Bookstore’s Young Adult (YA) book club a quick plug this week. Facilitated by Brian Jones and Jade Ong, the club’s been running for over a year now, and you should check it out sometime. The latest book discussed (two days ago) was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

Now Borders has a book club for young adults’ literature too. The first meeting will be held on Friday, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar will be discussed (see details below). Avid reader Ahnaf, who’s 19 (and whose YA reviews you might have read in StarMag’s recently launched YA! Fiction column in these pages), will be leading the discussions for The Bell Jar.

I invited him because I figured it’d be cool for those attending to have someone their age to talk to about the book, and because Ahnaf is, in his own words, “a Plath-stalker” – he owns everything written by the poet and practically everything written about her. And he wrote a research paper about her for a special A-Levels exam. Yeah, I think he’s the right person to facilitate this discussion.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about the book club, it’s not too late to participate. You have about five days to grab a copy of Plath’s novel, read it, and get to Borders at The Curve in Mutiara Damansara, Petaling Jaya. Don’t worry, it’s not a book you’ll struggle with.

The story of Esther Greenwood, an attractive and talented young woman who has a mental breakdown, was written when Plath was about 30, but she captured really well the deliberately flippant tone of adolescence. Esther is intensely, almost painfully, aware of everything and everyone around her, and her descriptions ring with dark humour that will have you grinning (and even laughing out loud) before you notice their depressing and grim inferences and implications. 

Esther’s first person account of her slow descend into insanity, her almost cold-blooded scrutiny of herself as the bell jar lowers, snuffing out reason, hope and life, is bewitching and unsettling. I think I would have enjoyed this book enormously back in the day when I fancied myself doomed and stayed up all night listening to David Bowie’s Station to Station and planning my own funeral. Unfortunately (fortunately?), I only came across Plath during my disgustingly cheerful mid-20s.

My angst-ridden wannabe-writer feminist friends were all in love with her, but her poems just made me impatient, and I viewed Esther’s hopelessness and helplessness with the superior disdain felt by someone who thinks (inaccurately) that their life is sorted. 

For some reason, I have more empathy now and, at 40, can recall my difficult adolescence with more clarity and understanding than I did in my mid-20s – some things (many things, in fact) do improve with age. I think I am developing respect if not affection for Plath’s work.

If you’re thinking of getting a copy of The Bell Jar, I recommend the HarperPerrenial Modern Classics edition (244 pages, ISBN: 978-0060837020), which has an extra 22 pages about Plath’s life (by Lois Ames, and featuring drawings by Plath herself), notes on the book, and information about Plath’s other work (prose and poems), letters and journals.

See you at the book discussion.