I’m not going to rate this one.

Simply because it’s a diary and I don’t think it right to rate someone’s life and deepest thoughts and concerns.

I loved it, from the first to the very last page.

It’s not an easy read, so if you’re looking for a light and simple book, don’t read it.

She’s so deeply human that it will make your heart bleed.

You can feel her pain, her joy, her struggles, and her hopes.

It’s like you’re walking in her shoes and experiencing her life with her.

This diary is a beautiful and powerful piece of writing that will touch your soul and make you think about your own life.

It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the human condition and the power of words.

I spent a century to finish this book, but from time to time I would retrieve it from my bedside table and read a few pages. It was always worth it.

Although it took me an incredibly long time to complete this book, it was a journey that I was glad to have embarked on. The process of reading it was not rushed, but rather a slow and steady exploration of its contents.

Each time I picked up the book, I was greeted with new ideas, perspectives, and emotions. It was like opening a door to a new world, one that I could lose myself in for a while.

Even though the book was challenging at times, I persevered because I knew that it was going to be a rewarding experience. And in the end, it was. I have gained so much from reading this book, and I will cherish the memories of it for a long time to come.

It must be read under strict psychiatric and psychological supervision, in small bites, because it is hardly digestible.

In the first part, I believed I had reached the apex of libertine pleasure. Then, everything became gloomy, repetitive, and extremely slow.

However, I do not recommend against reading it. On the contrary.

This work presents a complex and challenging exploration of certain themes. The initial allure of the libertine pleasure gives way to a more somber and repetitive narrative, which might test the reader's patience. But it is precisely this complexity that makes it worthy of consideration. Under the guidance of psychiatric and psychological supervision, one can potentially gain a deeper understanding of the human psyche and the various facets of pleasure and pain. So, while it may not be an easy read, it could offer valuable insights for those willing to undertake the journey.

My poems are tiresome. An oak tree devours the crumbs on the wet porch. My head is an army of thoughts. I don't even dare to open Yeats, Eliot - the old joys always fresh - because of the pain it causes me to remember the first brilliant contacts. Less capable of losing myself. And no one is as good as me at getting lost quickly.

My creative output in the form of poetry seems to have lost its charm. It's as if an oak tree is greedily gobbling up the small pieces of food on the damp porch. My mind is filled with a jumble of thoughts, like an army marching within my head. I'm too afraid to pick up the works of Yeats and Eliot, those literary giants whose words have always brought me joy. The mere act of remembering the initial wonderful encounters with their writings brings me pain. I feel less able to let myself go and get lost in the world of my own thoughts. And yet, paradoxically, no one seems to be as adept as I am at quickly losing myself in the chaos of my own mind.

Perhaps this is a phase, a period of self-doubt and creative block. But I hope that I can find a way to break free from this rut and once again create poems that are not just tiresome, but that have the power to move and inspire others.

Deep pages that tell in their own way phases

of life that every girl in the course of 20 years

experiences at least an hour in her life. Sylvia Plath

is the voice of many, even today. Her works are like a mirror that reflects the complex and often tumultuous emotions and experiences of young women. Through her poetry and prose, she explores themes such as love, loss, identity, and the search for meaning in life. Her words have the power to touch the hearts and souls of readers, making them feel understood and less alone. Even though she passed away many years ago, her legacy continues to live on, inspiring generations of women to express themselves and to find their own voices. Sylvia Plath is truly a remarkable and influential figure in the world of literature.

She died before truly dying, and perhaps she only lived afterwards.

This statement seems paradoxical at first glance, but upon closer examination, it holds a profound truth.

Maybe she had been living a life that was not truly fulfilling, going through the motions without really experiencing the essence of life.

Then, through some significant event or realization, she died to that old way of being.

And it was only after this "death" that she began to truly live, to embrace life with a newfound passion and purpose.

It's as if she had been asleep all along and only woke up when she faced her own mortality.

This new lease on life allowed her to see the world in a different light, to cherish every moment and make the most of every opportunity.

She had finally found her true self and was able to live a life that was authentic and meaningful.

Attenzione: fragilissimo.

Sadly, Sylvia's body no longer exists. However, in these pages, her soul is still present, as fragile as crystal.

These diaries are the "logbook of an extremely acute, lacerated, and dramatic sensibility." They are the account of the brief existence of an extraordinary author who made writing a "form of life."

"It is sad to be only capable of declaiming other poets. I want someone to declaim me." And so, Sylvia, wherever you are, look at us. Look as we read your works. Observe us tremble and cry in the face of your pain transfused onto the pages. Smile as you see us talk about your works. Now you are in the literary Olympus, among the greatest of all time. You realized too late that you had The Gift. And perhaps it is for this reason that you left us too soon, at the mercy of so many people who, for two kissed rhymes, believe they are Pessoa and Sappho.

"My world is falling apart."

"Diaries", Sylvia Plath, 1998.

I will believe in my own space, I, a strange and cramped little space, but sufficient and with a view, to be happy inside.

Why choose exactly this one, among so many underlined, saved, reread parts of the diary? Because in the diary of Sylvia Plath I myself have found a space to be happy.

Sylvia Plath's diary is like a hidden treasure chest. It is filled with her deepest thoughts, emotions, and dreams. As I flip through its pages, I am transported into her world, a world that is both beautiful and tragic. This particular passage stood out to me because it speaks to the universal human need for a place of our own, a place where we can be ourselves and find happiness. In our busy and often chaotic lives, it can be difficult to carve out such a space. But Plath reminds us that even in the smallest and most unlikely of places, we can find contentment. Her words inspire me to look for my own "strange and cramped little space" and to make the most of it.

Sylvia Plath is one of those authors - perhaps the only one, or at least the first - who annihilate my rationality.

When I first read "The Bell Jar," I completely surrendered to her writing. I let that jumble of pain, fears, accusations, and dozens of other emotions that I didn't want to rationalize sweep over me, and it was a radically different experience from simply reading a novel. It was a completely intimate experience, a totally personal journey within my own boundaries, an instrumentalization of someone else's work to talk only about myself. A selfish gesture, perhaps, but Sylvia Plath's entire body of work is something extremely selfish in a certain sense: in every word of hers, there is Sylvia, only Sylvia. And perhaps it's banal because in the work of any writer, there is the writer himself, but Sylvia Plath is her writing, always has been, and is so in such a totalizing and extensive way that one almost feels like an intruder lingering on her lines. I think that Sylvia was so much her writing, her tension, her struggling need to write and be accepted as a writer that she lost sight of the contours of the woman Sylvia, lost them long before that February 11, 1963.

I took almost two months to finish these diaries. Two months to enter the mind of a woman and live 12 years of her life may be few, but they are surely many compared to my normal reading pace. But, as I said, Sylvia Plath annihilates my rationality, she did it with "The Bell Jar," she did it with her poems, and even more so with her diaries, which certainly cannot and should not be considered as just any literary work. Several times I was on the verge of giving in, as during the reading of "The Bell Jar," to let the writing sweep me away and drag me with its seductive and magnetic force, but I held back. With an enormous effort, but I held back. Because here, unlike the novel or the poems, there is Sylvia in the raw, Sylvia without masks, Sylvia suffering a pain so great and unfathomable as to be terrifying. Sylvia is her writing, but her diaries are a window that perhaps one should not look through. Several times, during the reading, I asked myself if it is really correct to allow anyone to tear down even the only veil of privacy and respect that remains for a person. Sylvia gave herself to the world with her poems, her stories, and her novel, she gave herself in such an open and total way. The chronicle has given us a thirty-year-old woman who, after preparing breakfast for her children, one morning in February, put her head in the kitchen oven. Was it really necessary to put in front of everyone's eyes - along with the beautiful reflections on her writing, which are certainly useful and perhaps necessary to better understand the work of this great poetess - also the extremely private moments, those that, and it's easy to recognize them when reading, clearly Sylvia would never have intended to reveal? I don't know. Ted Hughes, in the preface, writes: "There were two other notebooks, two registers lined with brown paper like the volume for 1957-1959, with annotations from the end of 1959 to no more than three days before her death. The second of the two contained the notes of many months and I destroyed it because I didn't want her children to read it (in those days oblivion seemed essential for survival). The other has disappeared." There you have it, perhaps we should never have read what for Sylvia was only a release, an attempt to survive her immense pain. At a certain point, she notes that she only finds herself writing in her diary when she is in a bad mood (and the bad mood of a clinically depressed person is certainly not the bad mood of a person who has had a bad day), when she is happy, she lives, she writes, she loves her husband and doesn't think about the diary. Is it really right to take all the pain of a person and throw it in front of everyone's eyes? It doesn't matter that these eyes may be compassionate eyes, eyes that in some way, even years after her death, have loved Sylvia, and find themselves drowning in her pain just to try to understand her better, to be a little closer to her, to be one step closer to that immense "I" that wrote such beautiful poems.

I don't know. I'm not sure of the answer to questions like these, or perhaps I am, but the point is that I held back, I built dams against the immense, so real and tangible pain of Sylvia, I took about two months to read just over 400 pages, but I got to the end of this "logbook."

And the pain, Sylvia's pain, is impossible to rationalize.

I'm sorry, I know this isn't the review one would expect to read, I know I may have talked too much about myself, and that perhaps certain things I should have simply kept quiet, but if I try to think of something to say about these pages, this is the best I can come up with.

If all the authors we appreciate had kept a personal diary, probably our perspective on their entire works would be much more complete, and we would be able to explain more easily those small stylistic or content details that seem incomprehensible or apparently senseless at first glance.

Sylvia Plath has involuntarily become the narrator of a category of people who have always been stereotyped and ghettoized, destined by society to wallow in their "nonexistent illness": those who suffer from depression.

Sylvia Plath did not write the "Diaries" to serve as a universal spokesperson for her experience similar to that of many others, as she in turn was a victim of a socio-economic system based on pleasing others and on self-oppression and suppression.

Sylvia Plath writes because paper and pen are part of her ontology. She writes to tell herself, not directly addressed to the world against which she lashes out.

I exhort anyone who wants to approach this author to start by reading her diaries. Although they may seem heavy in the long run due to the non-linear structure of the text as it is not intended for a public and the complex themes treated with the frankness and completeness that only an empirical experience can give, they allow us to understand every single nuance and background of her poems or her famous text "The Bell Jar".

Plath demonstrates through digressions, narrations, style exercises and streams of consciousness two of the fundamental aspects to know about any artist: her style and her interiority.

Reading Sylvia Plath for the first time was an unforgettable experience for me. Reading her for the second time was a cathartic experience, to say the least.

I was forced to strip away my shields to intersect her world with mine, and as she wrote:

"A hundred years ago a girl lived as I live. Then she died. I am the present, but I know that I too will go. The sublime moment, the consuming flame arrives and immediately disappears: shifting sands, always."

That woman she speaks of, for me, is precisely her; Sylvia Plath.

With the diaries, which have turned out to be far above my expectations, my readings on the theme of suicide continue, after Dagerman (our need for consolation) and Camus (the myth of Sisyphus).

It is not a literary work in the purest sense of the term. In the sense that the author did not think of it for a public but wrote it, without frills, without thinking about style or a possible recipient, for herself, as a form of expression that I would no longer call purer, because it is not sublimated as it could be in poetry, but more direct and immediate. In fact, we find here reported facts of normal life, everydayness, and especially her ups and downs, the always serpentine mental illness that unfortunately conditioned all of her life like a suffocating cloud from which she was unable to free herself except with an extreme gesture: putting an end to herself. We see the fundamental need to tell oneself, analyze oneself, express oneself, reflect on oneself through a written text that remains black on white, externalizing our interiority, making it in a certain way more accessible because it is metabolized by the pen and crystallized in that moment, when in our belly it is inevitably changeable and confused, magmatic: how we represent ourselves is a way to know ourselves before making ourselves known.

It is not an easy text because of the content but extremely interesting to contextualize its production and get to know it: we find from the backstage of the works, to her private life, the drama of depression and infertility, the creative process but also the frustration connected to it. It is a work dense with reality, which turns out to be all too present, in the most painful way possible; this makes it a sometimes devastating narrative that does not analyze like "our need for consolation" but remains a vivid and immediate proposition of what the author experiences immanently.

It has the power to make anyone who has had moments of discomfort, discouragement, who has felt stuck, feel understood, because we find them optimally represented even if sometimes in an extreme way, but there is the risk that it will drag you down with her, completely lacking hope.

I have to admit to feeling a sharp pang of guilt at perusing what were private journals never intended for the prying eyes of the outside world.

What's more, every indication is that this edition pales in comparison to its unedited successor. The unedited version bore no trace of the interfering and subsuming hand of Ted Hughes. There are reasons both obvious and personal for this. It included, among others, that which editor Frances McCullogh obliquely refers to as the nasty bits.

Still, it's the only copy that was up for grabs at the Thrift, and so there you go. The opening words—I may never be happy—absolutely permeate the essence that inheres within her poetry (or at least, that which I've had the pleasure to read).

As one quickly discovers, they also reveal the turbulent life that birthed the verse. This life, though, also allowed her access to a mother lode of primal emotion, intuition, understanding, and feeling. And through this bleeding of emotions, she bled herself unto death. It's a tragic yet captivating story that unfolds within the pages of these journals.