Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I assume that it can only get better from here, but I do plan to read as much of Jean Rhys's work as possible. She tries to relive the dream of her youth, but she doesn’t alter her behaviour; she carries on in her woe, and it is her end.

Sasha's encounters are told with a feeling where you never know how things will end up, any unstable predicament likely to happen at any given moment. Her life which is splattered on those forgetful streets, and bars where everyone is cruel, everyone disapproves.Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight is an unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determinationIn 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. How anyone could believe that a woman in this state might benefit from such a solitary trip is beyond me.

There are some great lines, for example, things like “there must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. In 1949 a theatrical adaptation of the novel was created, for which she was tracked down via newspaper advertisements to obtain her permission.During this period, Rhys, familiar with modern art and literature, lived near poverty and acquired the alcoholism that persisted throughout the rest of her life. I tend to wallow in it for awhile; put For Emma, Forever Ago on the stereo (who’s lonelier than a broken hearted guy recording an album by himself in a cabin in Wisconsin in the middle of winter? If you trip and fall into bed (it was already there) and cry and have it all out and then get up again and feel all the eyes staring on you because you MUST look like you've fallen apart and it's much worse that this is the normal to get back to and everyone must know that it's not the end of the world and your normal at all (how awful it's not even the end) is not a flash in anyone's fire. Since I’m having discussions with Violet through buddy reading - I don’t feel compelled to make this a lengthy review. As usual, I find myself with nothing to say about a classic novel except that it deserves its status as a classic; I wish I'd read it sooner, though I can't decide whether I'd have appreciated it more or less when I was younger; and it will stick with me for a long time.

Rhys' figure of Lise, with whom Sasha has a loving, non-hierarchical bond, is seen by Tomasulo as an 'ironic commentary' on Liza. Like Ken in Baobab, Sasha views her mental anguish as a function of her social position and context, including gender and class. A lonely French woman in Paris wanders from dingy bar to dingy bar and from seedy hotel to seedy hotel. Naipaul wrote in 1973 that it is "the most subtle and complete of [Rhys'] novels, and the most humane". This changing of name is also a way of breaking from her family, her parents, who named her, of course.Told with a spare prose style, this reads as a work of psychological fiction, but redeems Jean Rhys' own consciousness throughout. Apparantly at the time of publication, the critics praised the writing of this book, but said that it was unenjoyable due to its depressing subject matter. She is drinking copious amounts of alcohol to numb the pain that is life; she has been shit on, and she just couldn’t pick herself up. A middle-aged, alcoholic Englishwoman adrift in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars, drunken encounters and sad reminiscence. This hostility that slits open her wounds and makes her crumble into the dampness of tears and pain.