"the New York Trilogy" by Paul Auster

"the Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath

It’s 50’s, you are a young woman just arrived in New York with a scholarship you granted and just about to do your internship in a famous magazine. Being full of ambitions, dreaming big things but gradually finding yourself inside a dilemma. Life becomes harder as your ambitions don’t match with what society expects from you. At the end, you figure out that your sole guide to help you find your way out in this labyrinth is to commit suicide.

If you like it, please keep reading.

Doreen is a young woman who is the main character of the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Throughout the book, you’ll accompany her while she begins to struggle with the reality just waits out there in the cold New York winter.

Herein I would like to focus on the main character:

Doreen has troubled me a bit since she is somehow one of the types whom I always try to keep at arm’s length – willingly or unwillingly: they are never afraid of revealing their minuses or weakness. I’m not of course troubled by their courage but somehow by their putting their foot in the mouth in presence of others. I’m mostly worried not for me but them.

On the other hand, there are dramatic similarities between me and Doreen and it made me go over and over again the same pages. Plath’s description of fig tree especially was one of these that-happened-to-me-as-well parts of the book, she skillfully portrayed the choices in a women’s life in the form of fig tree: while you are trying to decide which one to pluck, they all got mature and falls down. This is more or less what happened to me drastically if not fatally. The sad thing on the other hand is that our fig trees are planted by men and the fruits of all these trees including Doreen’s are the fruits of male dominated perspective of life. I also personally like Doreen’s relation with water, her finding refugee in warm bath. No need to mention, as you can guess, this is exactly how I feel most of the time.

And the last thing I should highlight is, apart from such kind of individual heart beats I found in the book which are pros to me as well as unrealistic suicide descriptions which were cons, Mrs. Plath plays a beautiful game in her first and last book.

And just only for this let’s-link-it game, I say you should read it.

You should read it - even if you don’t like it at the first place- because at the end you’ll be able to comprehend how strongly Sylvia Plath connected these two facts: to be executed by government and to be executed by the society, your colleagues, your friends and your family are no different than each other.

"Beatrice and Virgil" by Yan Martel

OK, let’s start with Beatrice and Virgil.


It is not the first book -as most of you well guess- that I’ve read from the writer. I bought it almost 6 months after I finished “Life of Pi” when in Paris where I bought also the second copy of Life of Pi as a present to someone who thinks read write is only an eye action – which is another sad story to tell and I prefer to leave it for another blog.


I’ll start with the moment that I finished the book and turned the last page: the first thing I felt was a huge void. Yes, a huge void. If I’m attached to a book or better to say if a books wins my heart alright, I usually feel that all the characters in the book, who’ve been living with me until that very moment, who walked besides me wherever I go, who sat and waited while I was sleeping, leave me as soon as I finish the book. They kiss me good bye and leave the room one by one waving their hands.


Might be sounding a bit sloppy, but hell yeah, this is usually how I feel.

Getting back to dear Beatrice and Virgil, what hits me after having finished it was that said void: sort of emptiness slapped me in the face; there was something missing in the book. Then having thought over it a little bit more I found out what was bothering me exactly there: the book was pretty dramatic and gloomy, even heart breaking, but since the writer didn’t focus on the story of Beatrice and Virgil well enough, distracting the attention from them -instead attracted it to the narrator and his own story of which the animals are both a part and at the same time not- one cannot keep going on feeling what he just starts to feel.


Yan Martel gives you something, put it just before your eyes. When you lean forward to have a closer look he takes it back so fast that you even don’t understand what you just felt a second ago.


I wish we could read more about their journey and their conversation in its all sadness.

I wish Mr. Martel gave us some more moments to sing our requiems and to mourn after all what happened…