My review of Tales of the Wide Caribbean, by Jean Rhys

Tales of the Wide Caribbean

by Jean Rhys

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Published six years after her death, when she was still highly acclaimed for her award-winning Wide Sargasso Sea (1969), this collection focuses, as its title states, on the same part of the world, her Caribbean homeland. 

Some of the material had only been published in the better literary journals and newspapers, some of it had cropped up in earlier collections and some had never seen the light of day.

Those who read Jean's posthumously published unfinished autobiography Smile Please will recognise fictionalised glimpses of her formative years in these short stories (many have insisted that all of her fiction was in fact her memoirs encrypted).

Regardless of whether the sources were autobiographical, her storytelling is hypnotic, enthralling. We are there, on her late-Victorian/early-Edwardian Dominica, feeling the sun, smelling the ocean and exotic flora, hearing echoes of the island's inhabitants, empathising with this soul-baring raconteur. This is probably an old Jean Rhys remembering an extraordinary girlhood. Her characterisations are mesmerising, her words and sentences haunting.

Those unacquainted with Rhys' wider body of work may find less meaning in these stories than do her fans. But for this devotee, these almost filmic tales are priceless for their realism and authenticity.

As meticulously penned as all her material and painstakingly compiled in her wake, this is truly the icing on the cake for any Jean Rhys reader.