When we know someone really well, we can practically finish their sentences. The same can be said about dialogues from our favourite movie scenes and sentences from beloved books.
Click start to play today’s Crossword, where we will start a sentence from a popular film or novel and you can finish it in the puzzle!
One of the clues is from American author and poet Sylvia Plath’s acclaimed book, The Bell Jar: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart…” (10-Down). As Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar was a semi-autobiographical book, published one month before the writer committed suicide at age 30.
The book too, is the story of a poet who tries to take her own life. It mirrored Plath’s descent into mental illness. She suffered from clinical depression during her late teenage years, and survived her first suicide attempt when she was only 20 years old. Plath is known to have described the quality of her despair as “owl’s talons clenching my heart.”
But before she succumbed to depressive suicide, and even before she became an American icon, Plath was special. At age 12, her IQ was recorded at around 160 (the range for being considered a genius begins at 140). She was also a gifted student throughout her life, and won many awards, including the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, which gave her the opportunity to study in England.
Her talent, however, was not always recognised. When Plath received a $2,080 (Dh7,640) fellowship for novel-writing from the publisher Harper & Row, she turned in her manuscript for The Bell Jar. But they declined to publish it, calling it “disappointing, juvenile and overwrought”. The novel was then published for the first time in the UK, but Plath was never able to find a publisher in the US for it during her lifetime. Today, the book is part of the required reading list in the American high school syllabus.
But it wasn’t just her novel that propelled Plath to fame. A master poet, she wrote over 400 poems in her lifetime. Her work, The Collected Poems, won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, albeit posthumously.
Play today’s Crossword and dive into the work of novelists and film-makers. Tell us if you enjoyed it at games@gulfnews.com.
