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The Swedish writer offers an audacious, gripping novel imagining the poet’s final year and the conflict between creative genius and domestic life“Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry,” Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary, half longing for and half fearing the return of Ted Hughes in 1956. Both poets used each other as material and fuel for incandescent, mythological writing. To write about their marriage is therefore dangerous – you’re competing with two of the greatest 20th-century poets. But it’s seductive nonetheless, and perhaps especially for novelists, because it’s such a novelistic story: two writers locked in a life-and-death struggle in a remote house; a mistress invited into the household by Plath herself, in a gesture at once self-destructive and unknowing.Euphoria, a much-garlanded novel by Swedish writer Elin Cullhed, is an account of Plath’s final year, flooded with Plath’s own imagery and written from a perspective deep inside her head. There’s a massive audacity to it. Effectively Cullhed tries to do in more capacious, domestic and worldly form what Plath succeeded so spectacularly in doing in her final poems – writing all the pleasure and pain of maternal and sexual love in a world at once ordinary (baking, gardening, sleeping children) and feverishly charged. Think of the poem Nick and the Candlestick, in which Plath, walking with a candlestick to her son’s bedroom, becomes a miner alongside “waxy stalactites”, the baby’s room a womb exuding “black bat airs”. Continue reading...