Good Morning, Midnight
by
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Jean Rhys's 1939 Kafkaesque tragi-farce is an all powerful and evocative trip into a Paris of times past and the existentialist internal world of a tortured woman heading for disaster.
Middle-aged English woman Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris after a long absence. Her trip down Memory Lane is enabled by money lent by a kind friend. Close to broke, Sasha is haunted by a past loveless marriage and her baby's death.
Adrift in the city she feels connected to despite its painful memories, she bases herself in a dingy hotel room, waking and emerging mostly after dark, hence the title Good Morning, Midnight - taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson.
Sasha wanders streets and bars reminiscing. She drinks, takes pills, obsesses over her hair, clothes and creeping age, all the time ruminating scornfully over society.
This is the maturing Jean Rhys at her cynical best. Published on the eve of WWII's outbreak, when readers craved more uplifting, optimistic fiction, this was her last before vanishing into literary obscurity for decades, with people assuming her dead.
In its time it was thought too dark, too depressing, too sordid. More than a few found its storyline repellent. She was, however, a writer aeons ahead of her time, with a supreme talent for resonating with our innermost primal emotions.
My first ever reading of this was my chance introduction to Rhys, who would become my all time literary favourite. An eerie experience, it was like reading my own thoughts, penned decades before I was born ... just for me to read someday long after the author's death.
My affinity with Jean Rhys was instant and unshakeable. She was an underrated literary genius whose eventual great acclaim came far too late, when she was too old and frail to enjoy it. If only she could have been more prolific in her prime!
Good Morning, Midnight changed the way I read fiction forever and remains my favourite Jean Rhys novel. I still return regularly to it and quote liberally from its superlative narrative.
Prose at times like poetry, nihilistic yet astoundingly beautiful, everyone should read this timeless treasure.
Middle-aged English woman Sasha Jensen has returned to Paris after a long absence. Her trip down Memory Lane is enabled by money lent by a kind friend. Close to broke, Sasha is haunted by a past loveless marriage and her baby's death.
Adrift in the city she feels connected to despite its painful memories, she bases herself in a dingy hotel room, waking and emerging mostly after dark, hence the title Good Morning, Midnight - taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson.
Sasha wanders streets and bars reminiscing. She drinks, takes pills, obsesses over her hair, clothes and creeping age, all the time ruminating scornfully over society.
This is the maturing Jean Rhys at her cynical best. Published on the eve of WWII's outbreak, when readers craved more uplifting, optimistic fiction, this was her last before vanishing into literary obscurity for decades, with people assuming her dead.
In its time it was thought too dark, too depressing, too sordid. More than a few found its storyline repellent. She was, however, a writer aeons ahead of her time, with a supreme talent for resonating with our innermost primal emotions.
My first ever reading of this was my chance introduction to Rhys, who would become my all time literary favourite. An eerie experience, it was like reading my own thoughts, penned decades before I was born ... just for me to read someday long after the author's death.
My affinity with Jean Rhys was instant and unshakeable. She was an underrated literary genius whose eventual great acclaim came far too late, when she was too old and frail to enjoy it. If only she could have been more prolific in her prime!
Good Morning, Midnight changed the way I read fiction forever and remains my favourite Jean Rhys novel. I still return regularly to it and quote liberally from its superlative narrative.
Prose at times like poetry, nihilistic yet astoundingly beautiful, everyone should read this timeless treasure.
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