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I give a lot of books 5 stars yadayadayada but this book has 5 stars in a different way that means like 10 or 20 stars I think there were only two sentences I didn’t like and everything else was perfect

Leonard Michaels' Sylvia is the second and final novel by the relatively unkown American author. It explores a troubled marriage between the narrator and the titled character, during the early 60s in New York.
Never in my life has a book left this much of an impact. The way they fight, manipulate, cheat and abuse each other feels disturbingly real; This feeling is accentuated by putting us in the diary-esque writing style, filled with the narrator's quick emotions, little observations and downright helplessness in it all. The book's short, 130 pages length, only helps the case, giving the reader a feel for the intensity of the fights through the rapid writing style. I can't stress how hard hitting it can get, all through the lens of the narrator who normalizes the entire relationship and brushes it off, constantly telling himself that it's just love.
The novel even comes with a short introduction by Diane Johnson, giving the reader a quick summary and serving as a much needed content warning.
Sylvia gets a perfect 5 from me; It triggered some trauma that I didn't even know I had, both personal and through my close friends. The idea is executed perfectly, I'm just not quite sure if I can recommend it to anyone.

Sylvia: a novel was published in 1990. It’s Leonard Michaels’ short, recollected-in-tranquility account of a disastrous love affair. This is how he describes meeting Sylvia for the first time:

“She said hello but didn’t look at me. Too much engaged, tipping her head right and left, tossing the heavy black weight of hair like a shining sash. The brush swept down and ripped free until, abruptly, she quit brushing, stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch, leaned back against the brick wall, and went totally limp. Then, from behind long black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years.”

Some pompous literary guru was once asked what good writing should do. “Astonish me,” he said. It made you want to put a fist in his mouth.

I wouldn’t say Sylvia is astonishing, although I did gasp at the ending. But I do want to say that reading it was pure pleasure, and it made me think differently about writing. I read a hundred books last year and the only other one that made me do that was Anna Karenina. The rest were more or less entertaining.

Sylvia is fucked-up woman. The narrator of the novel, who is unnamed, is no prize either. One Amazon reviewer said, “Read this if you’re into two thoroughly unlikable people ruining each others’ lives and having sex.” This is true as far as it goes, but misses the point. This is from another Amazon review: “The narrator still doesn’t fully grasp his own role in his troubled young wife’s despair, seemingly unable to understand how things he did or didn’t do might have affected her.” This is also true as far as it goes, and is also beside the point. It isn’t the narrator who has to understand; it’s the author. That’s why this is a novel and not a memoir. The author understands, and gives a precise account of his understanding. He attempts not to justify, but to reveal, himself. That he succeeds is a kind of miracle because, of course, it’s the narrator, not the author, who’s doing the talking. What is revealed comes not from, but through, the narrator, between his words.

What good writing should do (I’ve come to believe) is make the reader see, as if the writer is looking out a window and must write in such a way as to allow the reader to see out the window as well. The greatest thing a human being ever does (I’m paraphrasing Ruskin here) is to see something and tell about it in a plain way.

Here’s one more example from the novel, a passage where Sylvia and the narrator spend a three-day weekend stoned and re-reading The Turn of the Screw:

“Sylvia was going on and on, both of us overwhelmed by her luminous ravings.
'I’ll tell you what it’s really about. Oh, my god, it’s so obvious.'
'I think you’re right. That is it. That’s what it’s about.'
She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately. Later, neither of us remembered what she had said, not one word.”

The passage delivers me to the window, where I can see with perfect clarity what is going on between these two. It’s utterly liberating, even though the view isn’t pretty. There’s a transparency in the writing, and it makes me want to open up my life.

You could say that Michael’s writing is just doing what we all want—showing, not telling. But the way of showing—the sudden, deft sentence illuminating both the way the character’s mind works, and the fix he’s in (“She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately”)—has a potency all its own.

I don’t post many reviews, since most of the books I read have been reviewed here hundreds of times. But Sylvia made me realize something: the books I want to talk about are the books I respond to not as a reader, but as a writer. I’m looking, I guess, for permission, for freedom, an open door, or (Kafka) the axe for the frozen sea within. I want to understand in a new way, as Sylvia leads me to understand, the possibilities of writing.

“I noticed my arm was around Sylvia’s shoulder and she had leaned her head on my arm. Our bad feelings were annihilated by big faces of love shining on the wall. Later, back in the street world, electricity lashed our eyes, crowds mauled us, traffic wanted to kill us, and evil birds of marriage, black flecks soaring high in our brains, threatened to descend, but we were going home, we’d soon be in bed, hidden, pressed closely together.”

this was the only time they actually loved eachother in the whole book and it spoke to me. beautiful.

Bleak story but wonderful writer. Defo wanna read some more of his !

"Sylvia", Leonard Michaels, 1992.

I favolosi anni '60 del secolo scorso.
Elvis Presley e Allen Ginsberg erano i "re del sentimento", e la parola "ama" risuonava come un proclama con la forza di "uccidi".
Erano gli anni, a metà strada tra il sogno e la realtà, dove "dietro ogni cosa c'era sempra qualcosa" ed "un'aura di sottintesi brillava dietro parole innocue, film, volti e avvenimenti riportati sui giornali." Dietro i drammi di Shakespeare e le canzoni di Bob Dylan, c'era qualcos'altro. Perfino dietro l'assassino del presidente Kennedy.
È proprio in questo periodo che questo libro fantastico è ambientato.

Due studenti, imprigionati in una "livida ossessione d'amore", che si "nutrono l'uno dell'altra", vivono le loro esistenze in un piccolo e squallido appartamento di MacDougal Street.
Sesso, droga, e niente rock and Rock'n'Roll.
Litigi, vortici di insulti, ossessioni, faranno sprofondare la giovane coppia in un vero e proprio "inferno coniugale".

Ispirato alla storia vera del suicidio della prima moglie dell'autore, questo libro è uno di quei romanzi che non può mancare d'essere letto.
Difficilmente si dimenticano uno stile così perfetto ed una storia terribile nella sua profonda verità.

Vivo per libri così.
Straconsigliato.

"(...) per il momento lei era lì accanto a me e la crudele incertezza dell'amore non era altro che un'idea, un sapore volubile, un dolce dispiacere nella notte estiva."

Sylvia is the fictionalized memoir Michaels wrote about his first marriage with Sylvia Bloch, woman who eventually committed suicide. At the beginning Michaels is rather lost:'I wanted to do something. I didn't want something to do.' He wants to write but it's not that easy, what he likes to do is reading:'I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species'.

Michaels falls in a heartbeat in his complicated relationship with Sylvia, like he says, 'it started with no beginning'. Things moves extremely fast, from strangers to intimate lovers:'by then, fighting everyday, we'd become ferociously intimate'. After the love affair starts there's no way out:'It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.'

Michaels often talks about the struggles of writing:'As a married man, I had to work for a living. I'd never believed writing stories was work. It was merely hard.' Eventually the relationship drains him of any energy and Michaels separates from Sylvia:'Everything came to me as sensations, not feelings. I had no feelings that I could name. I had no human feelings.' When Michaels comes back to New York to talk to Sylvia about divorce, the woman kills herself.

Un libro claustrofobico e meraviglioso.
(Possono coesistere questi due aggettivi in una unica frase?)

This was so raw and deeply personal that I don’t think it’s fair to give it anything less than 5 stars.

Qualche giorno fa ho provato il desiderio irrefrenabile di leggere un romanzo bellissimo su un amore disperato e tossico.

Qualcuno mi ha consigliato Sylvia di Leonard Michaels (mi hanno consigliato anche altre cose e, infatti, prossimamente, su questi schermi si respirerà tantissima allegria) e, ovviamente, mi ci sono tuffata a capofitto.

Mentre leggevo, non ho potuto fare a meno di pensare a Yates, in particolare a Revolutionary Road - forse per l'ambientazione, per l'epoca, per quello sguardo lucido e distante, per niente consolatorio.

A differenza di Revolutionary Road, però, Sylvia racconta una storia vera, nonché vissuta in prima persona da Leonard Michaels. Una storia già scritta in partenza. Una storia disperata - malattia mentale, disagio sociale, alcol e droga, promiscuità, relazioni torbide e tossiche, tra le altre cose.

E la scrittura di Michaels ha del miracoloso - è precisa, a tratti gelida, non scade mai mai mai nel dolciastro. È una scrittura, per certi versi, disperata - di una disperazione sottile che emerge, in filigrana, dietro il velo della pulizia, dell'asetticità - temo che asetticità non esista, facciamo che è una mia licenza poetica.

E dunque? Se, come me, in certe atmosfere e in certe storie ci sguazzate, andate e leggetene.

Here's my book jacket blurb: "It's the Feel-Bad book of the summer!"

In the mood for a riveting read that will make you want to curl up on your bathroom floor in a puddle of tears? Have I got the book for you!

But seriously...Michaels's matter-of-fact but poetic style seduces you into the unfolding horror of a young writer who slowly realizes he is thoroughly overmatched by his relationship with, let's say it plain, a crazy woman. It's the most realistic portrayal of the "relationship dynamics" between a "sane person" and a mentally ill person that I've ever read or will ever want to read.

One of the most disturbing and beautiful novels I've ever read.