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.

quanto dolore, quanta ossessione.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Well, it's a memoir.

I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn't know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself."
This isn't about the memoir but I am taking it anyway.

Sylvia: a Novel, according to the back blurb, was a story-length memoir first and then appeared again with "weird delirium" (not my words) of the 1960s and modern marriage. I half-assed read the back of the book and somehow came away with the idea that it was added onto, and I really can't justify this next part at all, from a magazine article. Where did I get magazine article from? The publication date says 1990. The events take place in 1963, which is when I think it was first written down. Right or wrong, I couldn't get the idea that Michaels took a bit of writing about something that happened to him (magazine article came from the writing exercise feel!) and added to it decades later out of the back of my mind. Writing to deal with something becomes something else and it was like the motives changed now. I don't really want to criticize the book for motives. That wasn't what I really thought about it.

But.... It's a memoir.

Michaels married Sylvia. He married Sylvia, he says, because marriage would solidify them. The fights whispering I'm sorry, the kamikaze planes would stop shooting down peace on earth and all systems go for set flight plans for wedded bliss blah blah blah. He married her anyway. He knew what he knew and he did it anyway. Listen, officer! I didn't know! My hands are clean except for these ink stains on the fingers. You can tell by my ink stains that I was wholly present the whole time.

There is no way that there was nothing else to Sylvia than their marriage. I have known women who don't seem present without the company of a man. I don't care. I don't believe it. Sylvia of 'Sylvia' is wife of Leonard Michaels. If she is a person without him it is listening to her "crazy" friend Agatha. (Agatha who is sexualized, so-called demeaned, offering up for an audience to her one listener. How is that different than writing a memoir?) She had attempted suicide before they had met. At least there was a scar on her wrist. He denies the attempt but then brushes away the bloodless (yeah right!) attempt as "She was good at it because she had done it before" (not an exact quote). He seems to be asking someone, maybe himself, in the writing if he was treating Sylvia like the whore she thought he was when he would walk ahead of her. The constant testing of her place. How is that different than writing a memoir? Turns to the audience: Listen to this chick, right? She's totally nuts! It's crazy, I can't do anything right. I don't want to criticize for this. 'Sylvia' doesn't always come off like this, exactly. But it's that whole writing about it in a memoir. She's dead and wasn't he in the right? She was a crazy bitch, right? I wanted a Sylvia that was a whole Sylvia, or even a submerged in a glass half empty Sylvia, not only his wife.

Why did he marry her when he knew what she was like? He wouldn't ask the right questions then and he doesn't answer with the right question in the book. Patterns are their own hypnosis. Winners and losers is wrong.

"It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it."
No, that's not fooling me. It might have something to do with someone who would try to win the past by writing a memoir.

I did like this description of writing a lot. "Writing a story wasn't as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I'd find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn't. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me."

I felt more turmoil about his struggle to get out of the way about his writing than I did for his marriage. I could relate to this and I also related to pretty much the first information he relays about himself is that he's a person who likes to read (as if that's the only thing he could think of to say. Not off to a good start for a memoirist!).

It was moving when he saw his own happiness in his own handwriting when apart from her, before her death. That was how he felt. What the hell does the right thing have to do with anything? Happiness away from something you know in your bones is not good for you beats any after the fact justification for what sounds good to explain something you just know. Oh. That's what I'm doing in this review... I didn't love this book and I don't want to criticize it because I didn't hate it. I know in my bones it isn't in my bones.

But did she really kill herself because she wasn't with him? Maybe Michaels couldn't get out of the way enough to really write about it.

There are illustrations by a "Sylvia Bloch". I don't want to know if they were the same Sylvia. I know they are... They look childish and helpless. She's in most of them. He's laying down like someone would lay down on train tracks. (Sylvia would be true if he ever did. He is too self conscious about his struggles to be a writer. Ugh! Writers.) Maybe it's a weird thing to criticize someone's life story for lying or unwillingness but... it's a memoir. Why would you write one of these if you were gonna hide behind Walker Percy quotes about the '60s? (I don't think I liked The Moviegoer. I'm not gonna check my gr ratings in case I rated it highly. Jesus, that's such a self serving memoir move there, Mariel!)

Larry McMurtry (of Lonesome Dove fame. Best book ever!) says on the back flap: "One of the strongest and most arresting prose talents of his generation". Okay, Michaels is pretty darn good at prose at times. But didn't he blurb something similar about Barry Hannah? Man, you blurbers are all the same. (Some other Mariel review from 2011: "Man, I hate memoirs.")

Edit- Ok, the hate has set in! I was thinking about this book more and it started worrying me more and more how Michaels complained Sylvia kept him from writing. I'm slow. Yeah, what a bastard. He makes me hate writing even more. If you don't want to get at what matters then why do it?

E’ un libro da ingurgitare più che da leggere, da ingurgitare un po’ perché non si vede l’ora di finirlo e di dedicarsi ad altro un po’ perché la scrittura di Leonard Michaels è velocissima e si resta risucchiati in un loop di situazioni identiche senza possibilità di uscire dal ciclo ripetitivo di un amore turbolento e claustrofobico senza soluzione.
Ma, se devo proprio leggere libri su giovani studentesse della New York University che vivono a Manhattan gradevoli d’aspetto, eccellenti negli studi, ragazze fuori dall’ordinario ma che hanno in corpo un ipergene della pazzia un po' accentuato, decisamente allora gli preferisco La campana di vetro di Sylvia Plath tanto per fare un paragone, che è un libro bellissimo, e dove l’anormalità è declinata in termini dolci, e meno violenti e distruttivi, con quella punta di ironia sulle difficoltà di vivere che suscitano una tenerezza e una empatia che per la Sylvia di Leonard Michaels non ho provato.
Ma sulla pazzia non si discute è un terreno alieno, ognuno ha la sua piccola o grande che sia, e su ciò di cui non si può parlare, si deve tacere» dice Ludwig Wittgenstein, né soprattutto mai emetter giudizio.

I hate when this happens. I hate when talented writers turn out to be obnoxious douchebags.

In terms of style, this is quality writing, but my God... What a dick.

I'm not saying Sylvia's behavior was okay, she clearly needed help. The thing is, he, her freaking husband who supposedly loved her, didn't even try to help. Didn't even try to understand why she was acting the way she was. Didn't even care.

He only cared about her mood in the context of whether it was making him (un)comfortable, and not because he cared about her as a person, independently of him.

The way he described her didn't tell us anything about her...

He kept repeating he loved her, but I didn't get neither why nor how. I didn't even get what she was truly like from all this. I gather she was way more complex than what he made her seem. All he knew was how to whine about her being difficult and label her as a madwoman.

This is just like Miller and Bukowski all over again. I feel these kind of books fit into a genre of their own. Male authors writing about their dysfunctional relationships with "crazy" women who "hold them down" always leaves such a bad taste in my mouth.

Even when they don't paint the women as stereotypically "crazy", there's always something... Ugh! It all feels very impersonal and superficial, lacking in devotion, in genuine interest in another person.

How can you claim to love someone without even bothering to actually see them for who they are?

None of these type of authors/characters try to make their relationship work, nor do they have the guts to break it off completely. Because either of those things would take effort, and they just can't be bothered, I guess. So all they do is complain. It's honestly so frustrating and tiresome to read about.

I keep picking up novels like this (literally just finished de Botton's Essays in Love) right before Sylvia, so there you go), and keep having high hopes because I do enjoy to read about complex relationships, especially when such stories are accompanied by reflective insights.

Why these never quite work for me is because I always side with these "hysterical" women the narrators try so hard to demonize.

These women make me wonder and I just want to understand them better. Then I get so annoyed when their own love interests don't seem to want the same in the slightest

Straziantemente bello. Triste, melancolico, sublime. Semplicemente speciale.