Heather ClarkRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Abstract

age to a writer he has deeply admired since the 1950s. Such an opinion holds a hidden irony, however, for while Vargas Llosa is himself a staunch realist, concerned with politics and contemporary social debates in his fiction, Borges’s writings revolved around more abstract themes such as dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, and mirrors. In books such as Ficciones and El Aleph, Borges made significant contributions to philosophical and fantasy literature and, in so doing, established a rich dialogue between Latin American letters and other world literatures. The book opens with a conversation between Borges and Vargas Llosa in Paris in 1963. In it, Borges confesses his admiration for Flaubert’s novels as well as for the poetry of Verlaine and Apollinaire. However , when asked about his interest in politics, he quickly replies that politics is nothing short of “una de las formas del tedio” (a type of boredom) for him. He repeats this idea on politics in another interview from 1981, while also expressing his admiration for Joseph Conrad’s and Henry James’s novels and asserts that modernismo was Latin America’s most important contribution to Hispanic literature. For Vargas Llosa, Borges “inventó una prosa en la que habitan tantas ideas como palabras” (he invented a way of writing in which there are as many ideas as words) and authored short stories that he describes as unusual, perfect, and cerebral. He credits him for a body of work that, along with his poetry and essays, constitutes pure intellectual pleasure. At the same time, he underscores Borges’s cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Borges was an author who enjoyed speaking about French or English literature as much as he did exploring old Scandinavian myths. He shared these interests with numerous reflections on Argentine literature and culture, amid a unique style of writing that was always rigorous and intelligent , as Vargas Llosa ably comments in “Las ficciones de Borges” (The Fictions of Borges) or “Borges entre señoras” (Borges among Women). The ten pieces included in Medio siglo con Borges are highly recommended reading to review the many facets of Borges as a writer and as a public figure from the perspective of another key protagonist of contemporary Hispanic letters. In them, Vargas Llosa pays tribute to an author he has read with admiration over the years and who is arguably the most important Latin American writer of the past century. César Ferreira University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Heather Clark Red Comet:The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath New York. Knopf. 2020. 1152 pages. OVER THE YEARS I’VE approached each new biography of Sylvia Plath hoping for a fully comprehensive account of her life that would portray her as the person of extraordinary intellectual and aesthetic accomplishment that she actually was rather than as the madwoman who killed herself. Heather Clark’s Red Comet is the book I’ve been waiting for. Meticulously researched and conceived with a sympathetic, sure-footed grasp of her subject, Clark has created a glasssmooth read of a thousand pages about Plath’s brilliant life and art. In the process she has filled in many of the spaces in the poet’s life that have remained inexplicably blank: her professor-father, Otto Plath’s, early life after immigrating to this country; the influential relationship between Plath and her psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher; and the behind-the-scenes alliance between Plath’s mother, Aurelia, and the poet’s benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty. Ultimately what emerges is the portrait of a highly resourceful, resilient woman—an uncommonly original thinker and artist who brought passion and discipline into remarkably taut balance in both her life and poems. Plath’s love of poetry ran deep, which Clark underscores by presenting selections from her juvenilia, something no previous biographer has done. These excerpts trace the rapid evolution of Plath’s rare lyrical gift and the singular industry and ambition with which she drove herself to express it as she matured. Clark also emphasizes Plath’s professionalism, which was unusual for a woman writer of her time. Despite regular rejections, she systematically continued to submit both poetry and fiction to women’s magazines and literary publications, and she also mastered the sophisticated...