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

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Because of this tendency to cry, she’s well acquainted with the many bar bathrooms of Paris, where she escapes to weep while staring at herself in the mirror. Sasha discovered that she was pregnant around this time, but she put off telling Enno, who was becoming increasingly irritable and mean.

Often considered a continuation of Rhys' three other early novels, Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? All in all, not a pretty story, but fascinating in its way, fast-paced, written in a stream-of-consciousness format. There is style too, which I would compare to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a man who also wrote caustic, near-plotless monologues, rife with ellipses…although Rhys’ ellipses suggest broken trains of thought, confusion, sluggishness, rather than, as with Death on Credit, recklessness, tension, and breakneck speed.Her everywoman heroine, Sasha, must confront the loves― and losses― of her past in this mesmerizing and formally daring psychological portrait. I mean, I have no desire to end up a depressive alcoholic in a rented room—though that’s a definite possibility at this point—but that does seem a marginally better fate than becoming a priapic fifty-year-old pontificating about Nietzsche to his cronies. 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? Reviews of books I have read, cover to cover, and occasional essays on more or less academic topics.

The dreams of youth and the aspirations for the future, once vibrant, now echo as distant, unattainable whispers in Sasha's attempt to relive them—a futile pursuit, as they can never be resurrected. The book uses fantastic imagery and sharp prose to perfectly capture the character’s increasing loneliness and isolation. In her life she found the simplest practicalities beyond her, and once said 'I have only ever written about myself'.They do remind me of the street cafes in Spanish cities that I always mistook for bus stops from the other side of the street, for some reason.

Her life which is splattered on those forgetful streets, and bars where everyone is cruel, everyone disapproves. 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. Everything has been served on the surface, sparsely, cut to pieces; the sadness, the brokenness, the joylessness of life.

There's a fabulous touch at the end when Rhys inverts and creates a horror show of Molly Bloom's triumphant yes to life at the end of her monologue in Ulysses.

In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period. Jean Rhys was a talent before her time with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young women. Sasha lies distraught on the bed for several moments before getting up to see if René left her any money. And not for a single moment in the novel did I doubt them, not for a single moment did I conceive that there could be an alternative ending.A disaffected, thirty-something woman, after being abandoned by her husband, goes to Paris and almost sleeps with a gigolo. Sasha's relationship with him is particularly ambivalent, since while she empathises with him as a victim, she also fears his sexuality and machismo. She couldn’t sleep or breastfeed, but the caretaker treated her well, wrapping her in bandages so her body would show no signs of having given birth.