My review of Tigers are Better-Looking: With a selection from The Left Bank, by Jean Rhys

Tigers are Better-Looking: With a selection from The Left Bank

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

No Jean Rhys fan would want to let this priceless opportunity pass.

Included is her fateful, first ever published collection 'Stories from the Left Bank', a glimpse of the legend in the making, as a young aspiring novice writer - even then she had the intuitive brilliance that made her adored by her select, intimate following. That her lover Ford Maddox Ford originally published these was clearly no pillow favour - he genuinely saw a rare, unique voice that would echo down through the ages after he gave her that start.

In these earliest of her efforts, which brought her by chance into the arms of her future mentor and lover and kicked off her literary career, we see into the Paris of the 1920s, with its cobblestoned roads, quaint streetlights, underground clubs, bars and restaurants and the English and American arts circles inhabiting this time and place alongside the city's gritty, colourful native characters. 

The more modern stories, written in her maturing years, are equally fascinating albeit for different reasons, her voice having gained greater distinction, her take on life the same as ever and her heels dug relentlessly into her own deeply personal literary ground.

Breathtaking work by one of our most underrated English language greats, a writer decades ahead of her time who yanks at your heartstrings and screams into your ear with a polite, understated whisper.

Like every one of her books, I ached to keep reading and mourned pathetically after finishing it. So much so that I returned to it three times and it still sits in my cupboard awaiting its next round someday.