I tried to revisit this book multiple times including by audiobook however I just could not read it comfortably finding the internal dialogue uncomfortable and not fluid. In the end I did not complete the book as I found it uncomfortable and depressing which is not something I look for in a book.

“I am. I am. I am. I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life”.

Elin Cullhed takes you deep into the mind of a troubled woman. As the reader, you read all about sadness, grief and depression. The author has captured someone suffering from depression and mental health issues without stipulating a diagnosis. I’ve only briefly heard of Sylvia Plath and knew nothing of her life or the difficulty she faced, so it was an open experience reading this while semi-thinking it based on a real-life person.

I think due to not knowing much about the book and topic, it often felt like the book wasn’t going anywhere and I found both characters deeply annoying. From a bigger perspective and upon reflection, the story details the sadness in Sylvia Plath’s life, but I wouldn’t say that the book gripped me enough to want to read further into the subject or surrounding the subject. I found it very repetitive and left with no context or answers at the end of the book.

Overall, the author has done a great job at writing about Sylvia Plath and if you know her work and life, then this would be of interest to you, but if you are the opposite of that - like me, you realise you are not the target audience and it can feel like a long read.

“Why was loneliness crueller to me than it was to anybody else? … I would be pickled in my jar of loneliness.”

In early 1960s England, a woman struggles between life as a wife and mother, and her desire to be a poet and a writer. After moving from London to small town Devon, her marriage begins to unravel and she feels trapped in a life of domesticity when she wants to be all things: mother, wife, poet and writer. The woman in question is Sylvia Plath, and her crumbling marriage is to fellow poet Ted Hughes.

This work of historical fiction is written from Plath’s point of view and covers a period of around 1 year from when they moved to North Tawton in Devon while she was pregnant with her second child, until the time she decides to move back to London to pursue her creative endeavours, in late 1962.

I knew little of Sylvia Plath’s life, other than she was married to Ted Hughes and she died at a young age. Cullhed captures the fire and passion of a creative woman who feels caged in a life of domesticity, while at the same time desperately loving her husband and children. As her marriage falls apart, she wrestles with her inner turmoil and devastating loneliness. The novel is largely internal dialogue and Plath’s mind can only be described as tortured. This book is largely a heavy, introverted read but I enjoyed it and it has set me on a path to discovering more about Plath and her writing.

The translated prose is excellent, and this book evokes a very realistic sense of what Plath's last weeks might have been like. Many have attempted to make sense of her life, and this is one of the best I have seen.

It was a good read but sadly nothing very special. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

Blazing and haunting, this is a treat of a story. I love Plath and her work so I was very excited for this. Lyrical.

This book will appeal to many people who are interested in Sylvia Plath and her relationship with Ted Hughes. It starts in Devon which is why I requested it (living in Devon myself and working in an Exeter bookshop)

I started reading it with interest, but found the style so deeply dense and self consciously poetic, that I couldn't get beyond the style. It was so rich that I just couldn't continue as I haven't got that level of concentration.

I am sure that many readers will love it, but am sorry it wasn't for me.

On 11 February 1963, at the age of 30, writer and poet Sylvia Plath killed herself by sticking her head in an oven in her London home and subsequently dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. Her two young children were asleep in the house at the time.

What drives someone to such drastic measures? This is the question that Swedish author Elin Cullhed attempts to answer. Although Euphoria is a work of fiction rather than a biography, it is based on Plath life and attempts to unravel the events that culminated in her death from the poet's point of view.

Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/15/euphoria-elin-culhed/

DEBUT Swedish YA author Cullhed has written a sophisticated stunner of a novel with Sylvia Plath as the main character. In the months before her suicide, Plath is heavily pregnant with her second child and stuck in a Devonshire village as husband Ted Hughes slowly extricates himself from their marriage. The novel is all interiority; clearly a Plath expert, Cullhed is in control of not just facts and dates but the tone, even the vocabulary, of Plath’s voice. We are in Plath’s head as she attempts to balance wifely expectations—constant childcare, gardening, cooking the Sunday roast—with her own desire for recognition and fame, always in competition with Hughes. She edits her Bell Jar manuscript and writes her Ariel poems in stolen moments and manic bursts. Lurking beneath it all is her madness, driving away Hughes and the remains of her support system. Her interior monologue is so intense it’s hard to take, no less so because we know what’s coming.

Cullhed’s rendering of Plath’s voice will haunt readers. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Sylvia Plath, feminist fiction, and powerful prose.

I give this book 3 stars overall. It was a good read but just not one of my favourites. I found the voice of the main character strong and I did learn something new about the author Sylvia Plath that was interesting to have learnt.

Told exclusively from Plath’s perspective, Euphoria provides an intimate glimpse into a brilliant, yet volatile mind. This is the internal monologue of a person teetering on the edge of an inky abyss, shifting from manic, energised confidence to the lowest of blues within a single chapter.

Though I obviously didn’t expect Euphoria to be a joyous read, I found it to be a lot more unsettling than I anticipated. For the most part, my discomfort was founded in its pretense - hovering between reality and creative flourish, Euphoria puts words into the mouth of someone who has already documented many of their experiences heavily.

While Cullhed is an interesting writer that skilfully resurrected Plath’s temperamental unease within the framework that led to her tragic end, I feel like Plath’s own voice is much more suited to this specific task. I would like to read other writing by Cullhed though.

I stopped reading after about 80 pages. I was quite looking forward to reading this one because of the subject, but I have to admit I found it an unpleasant experience. I knew that it wasn't going to be a happy novel obviously, but the voice summoned by Elin Cullhed is just too bitter, too self-centred, too hysterical. The more-often-than-not agressive tone, the constant rhetorical questions feel harrowing. Granted Sylvia Plath wasn't a very happy person, but the portrait is very unflattering. Maybe there was more beauty to come in later parts of the novel, but if I couldn't get into it after that many pages, I thought I may as well stop.

This fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last few years of marriage to Ted Hughes forces you to routinely remind yourself that this isn’t an actual memoir.

Read it if: you’re a fully paid-up Plath and Hughes nerd.

Don’t read it if: you prefer to keep the 1950s/60s housewife fantasy alive in your mind.

Most of the book is set against the backdrop of the couple’s first summer in Devon, and I enjoyed the depiction of the sense of claustrophobia and loss of leaving a city of the apparent idylls of country life.

I am fairly familiar with the story of Plath and Hughes’ relationship, so I knew to expect heartache, betrayal and ultimately, loss. A lot of the themes in this book are very moving, particularly when it comes to the frustration of writers’ block, dealing with the repercussions of mental illness, and raising young children at a time where there was very little support. The author captures these difficult emotions perfectly, in a way that makes them really hit home. I don’t believe anyone could read this book and not doubt that the 1950/60s housewife stereotype is nothing but pure misplaced nostalgia. Plath’s misery in this novel is absolutely visceral.

With thanks to Canongate and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I devoured this book. I have since gone to read anything by Sylvia Plath that I can get hands on, and am on such a pleasurable journey which started because of Euphoria. I felt Elin Cullhed, and the translator Jennifer Hayashida, captured Plath's voice perfectly, it truly felt authentic.
This is the final year of Plath's life, and she is taking it by its horns - between saving/destroying her marriage, wanting to become a beekeeper, and travelling to Connemara and London, she takes inspiration inspiration from all these things, whilst her never-ending desire to write is at times compromised by her role as a wife and mother.

Euphoria by Elin Cullhed is the fictional story of the last year of the great Sylvia Plath.

We follow along pregnant Plath's raw and unfiltered thoughts of the last year of her life with husband Ted Hughes and their daughter and towards the time her husband leaves her for another woman. Sylvia Plath is portrayed as a creative talent almost trapped in her marriage. She feels she has no room to write while taking care of household and raising their children, all while her husband disappears from her life.

Reviewing Euphoria is admittedly not an easy task. Sylvia Plath has been of big interest for a long time and not little is known of her life. So writing a fictional book about her last year in life is an interesting choice. While Euphoria is a great attempt to replicate Plath's feelings I personally am not sure if I like the idea of writing so many thoughts into an actual persons head, when we have her actual voice to read. Still if you are interested to learn more about Plath I will definitely recommend this book.

The story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath is one of those that has always fascinated me and so when I found a book about the last year of Plath's life, well, I had to pick it up.

It is written in her voice and she describes the year that her son was born and when Ted Hughes left her for Assia Wevill. This story is well known and although I learned very little from this book, it was interesting to see how the author used Plath's voice to give her perspective. She comes across as a woman that I'm not sure that I always feel sorry for. A creative talent, totally in love with Hughes and her children but almost trapped in the marriage. Rather than giving her freedom, she finds that she has no room to write. She is left with the children while Hughes disappears to write, disappears to London, disappears from her life.

Although, as I said, I don't feel that I learned anything new, what this book has given me the idea that I need to revisit Plath's work again. I think I need to hear her real voice.

I am a really big Sylvia Plath fan, The Bell Jar is one of my favourite books of all time. This book was beautiful, it felt like Sylvia herself had written it. It was like being inside her brilliant yet sad mind.

I'm always ambivalent about fictional recreations of real people, especially those who, like Plath, have distinctive and well-known voices of their own. From her searing, seething poems in [book:Ariel|10082832] to her sunny, deceptive letters to her mother Aurelia, and her journals which offer an inner voice, Plath is known to us in an unusual way, her facets and dimensions alternate and glitter in various modes.

Her poetry might not be autobiographical in any linear, simplistic sense, but she draws on her frustrations, her anger, her joy and her triumphs, her sensuality and sense of body, her rage and her incandescence that might sometimes appear as a death wish, or an annihilation from which is forced a shining rebirth.

The realities, too, of Plath's life and her marriage with the serial philanderer, Ted Hughes, has had excessive exposure; and her life is, all too often, seen through the hindsight of her death.

All of which is to say that it's hard to see what this book is trying to add to the story, one which has been documented, transformed, analysed and fictionalised, with other players making interventions and writing over Plath's own voice. Me, I'm unable to resist another opportunity to experience someone else's Plath but my ambivalence over this is clear.

There's no doubt that Cullhed is respectful of the real Sylvia but, at the same time, I can't help wondering if it's a little lazy to write a book which is so much about the way women, especially creative women, are repressed and oppressed by patriarchy and hanging that tale on someone with a ready-made and well-known story? It saves having to delineate character, for a start, and while there is <i>a</i> strong narrative voice, it's not any of the voices that I associate with the real Plath.

So I think I'm saying read this if you want to learn about the final year of Plath's life and marriage to Ted Hughes; read this if you want a book about how even a marriage between supposedly creative equals still ends up with the wife doing the housework, looking after the kids, feeding everyone, running the family's social and domestic life while the husband, even when in charge of one-year-old Frieda leaves her alone so he can just write a few lines of poetry owed to the BBC. Read this if you want a view of what it means to inhabit a female body, from pregnancy to post-partum breastfeeding and recovery, sex and affection. Read this if you want the vicarious sense of watching your husband slide into infidelity.

I just think this story isn't only Plath's, however intensely, courageously and furiously she has testified to all this and far, far more. And if you haven't read Plath's own words, her fiery, brilliant, luminous words that speak so tenderly and ragingly of what it means to be alive and in her head, I hope this book will lead you to Sylvia Plath in all her glory.

Stunning and shocking - Elin Cullhed takes the reader deep into the mind of a brilliantly troubled woman. There's great beauty here, but great sadness and great grief - and it feels like Sylvia Plath has been resurrected much like the Lady Lazarus in her poem. That fire is ever present - a sympathetic and clever recreation of the final year of one of our great writers