Column: Reread an old book, learn something about yourself
Apr. 4, 2016In the season-one finale of “Master of None,” Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, stands in the middle of a bookstore clutching a copy of “The Bell Jar.” Faced with a seemingly unending variety of life choices, each taking him on a drastically different path, Dev has exhausted every source of advice and looks to the Sylvia Plath novel as a last-ditch effort. Ansari’s voice can be heard reading some of Plath’s most painfully poignant lines: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America.”
