Sylvia by leonard michaels

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Un amore precipita violentemente, si schianta e muore.
Noi entriamo nella sua scatola nera e assistiamo a tutto quello che è successo prima della catastrofe.
Claustrofobia e penombra ci avvolgono dalla prima parola all'ultima.

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TheFlier

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

quanto dolore, quanta ossessione.

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Lylhium

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I don't really know how to react to this novel. I know from growing up with my mad sister that people suffering from mental/physical illnesses can be abusive. Much of Sylvia's behaviour sounds familiar to me and yes, I wouldn't hesitate to call it abuse. But how this book is written, and how Sylvia's actions are framed does not seem fair to Sylvia. For one thing, the 'a male writer falls in love with a mad, beautiful bitch; the sex is great at first, but they're doomed; she needs to die for him to write, and to live' narrative is immediately suspect...

What are we to make of Michaels' constant reiteration that he chose this relationship? How he uses this choice to justify and exculpate himself in the readers' eyes. How never really explores how he was 'feeding off' her, as was suggested by one of the psychiatrists, except to say (more or less) that he was Too Good a Person From Too Loving a Family. How she was substantially younger than him and he never addresses that power imbalance (she was just 19 and hadn't even chosen a major; he was a 27 year old grad student. Nb: he also creeps on his students when he becomes a TA: "some of the Italian girls [..] were visually delicious.") How he others her when she's first introduced; he's "hypnotized by Sylvia's flashing exotic effect" - her dripping wet curtain of "Asian hair", her "Egyptian"-looking "wide and sensuous mouth"...

What are we to make of Michaels, and society at the time, and their keenness to label Sylvia insane? What are we to make of Michaels' note that Sylvia never did the groceries or the laundry? How he would come home and she was just hanging around talking to her one friend, who he demeans as a ~sex-crazed woman who loves being debased and narrating her ~debasement.

What are to make of Michaels' humiliation re: buying tampax for Sylvia? His dread that people will label him a 'transvestite' for buying ~feminine hygiene products~? His portrayal of Sylvia as being 'turned on' by having emasculated him in this way, her slight smile. And the eagerness of the psychiatrist he visits re: having Sylvia committed by Leonard, not re: her own well-being given her suicide attempts, but again, re: emasculating Leonard by asking him to buy tampax for her. And Michaels' satisfaction at the psychiatrist's assessment of her based on his words.

What are we to make of this diary entry: "I have no job, no job, no job. I'm not published. I have nothing to say. I'm married to a madwoman." And right after: "I didn't [know] either as I held Sylvia in my arms and called her names and said that I loved her. Didn't know we were lost."

And what to do with this diary entry as well: "I was in pain. She was wailing."

I question Michaels' motivations in writing this book. It's decades after the fact. It's not an investigation into what made his wife tick, what did he miss, why was she the way she was. It's not a grief memoir. Michaels just revisits bad memories and reasserts that his wife was insane. Sylvia remains as opaque as ever and that's how he wants her to remain.

But I'm glad it helped inspire The Antlers' Hospice.

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beastboy

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A few close friends love this book. Like LOOOVVE. But I don't.

Yes, it is beautifully written. Yes, it is filled with raw and intense pain. Yes, it made me cry. But it is supposed to be a portrait, a mature reflection of a hideously dysfunctional relationship. And in one sense it works. I get how Michaels is young and naive and over his head. I get Sylvia's insanity (never called that, but that's what it is). I get the intensity of their fights. I feel his hopelessness. But I never understood why he loved her. I never got a sense of who she was or how she was appealing. He describes her as attractive but then has a mutual friend say, "she's not beautiful, you know." (Why did he do that? To show that it wasn't her beauty that held him entranced?) He claims she's smart but never shows it.

What's the appeal? What is the basis of his love? Who was the woman he was in love with? Who was Sylvia?

It's 2014 and I don't ever want to read another story about a sad sack young man in love with a "crazy." I never want to see another portrayal of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It's time to see the "crazy" or the Manic Pixie Dream Girl write books and movies and comics about the creepy assholes that are in love with them. THAT is something I'd like to read.

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element93

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Pound for pound (weighing in at a scant 125 pages) this is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Keeping with the boxing analogy, Michaels writes with a sort of punchy, muscular prose style that is both plain and profound at once. I kept marveling at how skilled he was at saying so much in so little space. His physical descriptions of characters were particularly impressive. It isn't often that the narration about the size and shape of a character's lips becomes one of the most pleasurable parts of the story, but Michaels has a real gift for revealing, shaping and drawing story through his characters.

The copy I own bills the story as a "fictional memoir." I have no idea what that means, but it didn't bother me. If it's a memoir then it's the best memoir I've ever read. If it's a novel then it might be considered a little abrupt or unfinished, but that still wouldn't change the fact that it is filled with high-quality writing throughout.

I guess I'd recommend the book to young writers, New York historyphiles, and masochistic boyfriends. In Sylvia, Leonard Michaels manages to make dark and disturbing a joy to read. Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm off to find more books by this guy!

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scareads

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A very short sharp sad read which takes place between 1961 and 1964, a Greenwich Village bo-ho version of the Ted Hughes/Sylvia Plath gruesome twosome waltz with madness and suicide (yes, another Sylvia). This Sylvia is like the more famous one in being intellectually gifted and driven to prove it, but whereas with Miss Plath I always wonder grimly what would have happened if she'd just hung on for a couple more years until the 60s started properly swinging and the feminists started roaring instead of dying in 1963, this Sylvia allows no such sentimental if-only nonsense. Because she was smack in the middle of the social avant-garde which the other Sylvia never encountered. For Sylvia Koch it was all free love, free drugs and free jazz (rock not yet being hip in the first part of the 60s) - and all this creative cutting-edge whirligig only made things worse. The hippies considered love to be a solution, and Miss Koch had, it appears, a basketful of love presented to her every day with flowers and frills and furbelows stuck all over it by Mr Michaels and it didn't help a bit. Like Neil Young says, an ambulance can only go so fast.

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SovietWeeb

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

IL CUORE RIVELATORE

Saul Leiter: Barbara or Margaret, 1955. È la foto usata sulla copertina dell’edizione Adelphi. La prima traduzione e pubblicazione è del 1994 a cura delle Edizioni e/o.

Ho visto le menti migliori della mia generazione, distrutte dalla pazzia, affamate nude isteriche, trascinarsi nelle strade, all'alba in cerca di droga rabbiosa.
Allen Ginsberg

La Sylvia del titolo è Sylvia Bloch, la prima moglie dello scrittore, Leonard Michaels.

Greenwich Village, 1960.

Siamo a New York, all’inizio degli anni Sessanta (dal dicembre 1960 all’agosto 1963): Leonard e Sylvia sono ancora studenti, lei segue dei corsi alla NYU e lui si sta già impegnando a scrivere racconti, la gavetta del futuro scrittore - si conoscono al Greenwich Village, a casa di una comune amica.
È un appartamento adibito a comune, lei è scalza, sembra un’egiziana, fanno subito l’amore, e subito cominciano a vivere insieme:
Ci conoscevamo da meno di un'ora, ma sembrava che fossimo insieme, nella pienezza di quel momento, da sempre. Cominciò senza un inizio. Facemmo l'amore finché il pomeriggio divenne crepuscolo e il crepuscolo divenne notte fonda.

Un amore fulminante, che porta a un breve matrimonio.
Un amore al primo sguardo, selvaggio, amour fou.
Litigano e si amano, litigano sempre di più. Il loro amore prende da subito una direzione distruttiva, ogni cosa diviene motivo di urla, liti furiose a cui seguono amplessi voraci, che li lasciano spossati e devastati, e perennemente insoddisfatti. Come se volessero nutrirsi l'uno dell'altra senza riuscire a saziarsi mai. Un delirio:
Non sapevano come stavano davvero le cose. Neanch'io lo sapevo, quando stringevo Sylvia tra le braccia e la insultavo e le dicevo che l'amavo. Non sapevo che eravamo perduti.

Fred McDarrah: Demolition of Artist’s Studio Greenwich Avenue May 19 1960.

Passano quattro anni di amore e litigi, poi Sylvia sceglie per entrambi, compie il gesto che pone fine a tutto, la tragica conclusione, la sua morte, suicida a ventitre anni. Quarantasette Seconal.

Storia di un inferno coniugale.
Michaels che scrive ci dice che è Sylvia a entrare in una spirale senza uscita di gelosia e sospetto, perfino sentirlo battere a macchina i suoi primi lacerti letterari la spinge in questa direzione, lei che non si sente mai all’altezza dei canoni estetici di lui. E certo il consumo di droga aiuta in questa direzione, certe droghe, e certi eccessi, portano inevitabilmente alla paranoia:

Saul Leiter: Jean, 1956.

Allen Ginsberg ed Elvis Presley erano i re del sentimento e la parola “ama” risuonava come un proclama con la forza di “uccidi”. Il film “Hiroshima, mon amour”, la storia di una donna innamorata della morte, stava avendo un grande successo. E così anche “Orfeo negro” in cui la morte era impegnata nell’inseguimento amoroso di una donna… C’era stata un’evoluzione della sensibilità, un contagio visionario derivato forse dalle droghe – marijuana, eroina, stimolanti, tranquillanti – la poesia della conversazione corrente. Un bizzarro delirio aleggiava nell’aria ed emanava dai corpi indolenti e sensuali che a passi strascicati percorrevano le vie del Greenwich Village.

Michaels prova a mantenere un certo grado di ambiguità, a non presentare come pura autobiografia i fatti che racconta, a mischiare memoir e romanzo.

Ogni coppia, ogni matrimonio, erano malati. Quest’idea, come un salasso, mi purgava. Ero infelicemente normale, ero normalmente infelice.

Saul Leiter: Fay, 1958.

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Lemonattor

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A bit reminiscent of Joan Didion at times, Leonard Michael's Sylvia is a tumultuous report of a compulsive and indulgent love affair. When I first picked up this book at a local half-price bookshop on a busy street near campus, I knew nothing about it. It was an impulse buy—just a short novel to pass the time on the bus ride home. The opening page instantly drew me in to this memoir (that may or not be fictional—I haven't concerned myself with the specificities of its verism much). Michaels's prose is haunting, fresh, and terrifyingly real. There is something very special and emotional about this book.

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Sylvia

leonard michaels diane johnson

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