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

Paris is the city to get lost and drunk in. This can be seen by the amount of literature concerned with these two essential elements of life, and Jean Rhys has conjured up an exquisite example of the stream of consciouness 'life in the gutter' tale of a girl lost and alone.At just the right length the novel concerns Sophia who has returned to Paris after an abscence in an attempt to rebuild her life. Unfortunately her life starts the spiral downwards as she wanders the streets and rests in the bars thinking of her past life and the events which have brought her this far.In equal parts tragic and compelling this is an essential read for anyone who feels like drifting, drinking and dreaming.

This is a short book but it is far from an easy read. At times I couldn't decide whether the prose was comical or devastatingly sad. There were moments when I'd be reading along and would have to stop after coming across amazing descriptions e.g. as a clock is being wound it is described as making a noise 'somewhere between a giggle and a burp'. I knew instantly the noise Jean Rhys was writing of, we had an old clock that did that too. I haven't yet read the other reviews but I'm wondering whether readers come away with differing views of the main character and where her life has been and is heading. Is it tragedy, partly comical, positive or a mixture of all? My feeling is you could argue all of these points depending on your analytic sensibilities and also you view of women and, obviously, feminism in particular. A great choice for a book group and an important one to mark out for older teenage women you are close to (daughters, nieces etc). It'd be a great way to encourage conversation about the realities of feelings of love and hate and how that changes as women grow-up. Indeed how women can turn everything in on themselves.

A middle-aged, alcoholic Englishwoman adrift in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars, drunken encounters and sad reminiscence. Bleak and hopeless, beautifully written. Jean Rhys’s heroines have me wanting to send them to rehab, school them in assertiveness and break their dependence on men; but they are irredeemably Jean Rhys herself. In her memoir ‘Stet’, Diana Athill devotes a chapter to Rhys that starts, ‘No one who has read [her] first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.’

Good Morning, Midnight is beautifully tragic, darkly humorous, and completely hopeless. Set in the 1930s, Jean Rhys writes of an Englishwoman who returns to Paris after a long absence, but rather than affording her a new start, the city only reignites the painful memories of her past. From the very beginning I was hooked. Rhys's portrait of Sophia Jansen, an isolated, broke, drunk and ageing woman, is the heart of the novella; the plot and the lives of other characters pale in comparison to the swirling psychodrama of the lead character, rendering her melancholy that much more acute. Not a light read by any means, but certainly an addictive one.

I loved the work of Jean Rhys as I know it will always be different yet true to life. Don't expect any happy endings but you will get a great snap shot into the life of a certain class of women struggling with the meaning of like and love in Paris in the 1930's. This author has now become a subject of academic study and the value of her work re- evaluated in the context of her time and her contribution to the 20th army of women writers.

I was blown away by this book. So much happens in such a short space. The book uses fantastic imagery and sharp prose to perfectly capture the character’s increasing loneliness and isolation. As this is a short book I was expecting it to be a breezy, easy read. I got quite the opposite. The book is devastatingly sad at times but there are moment of comic genius that I can’t be sure were intentional or not. There are some light moments as well. This short book is very bleak for the most part which makes it seems like a much longer piece of writing, hundreds of pages more than it actually is. This isn’t the kind of book I would normally read. There is no real plot and the other characters are barely more than outline. Yet there is something I really loved about it.

Yes, her style is lovely and the narrative always worth reading...but her melancholy world is truly dispiriting!

this book is so amazing and I colossally enjoyed each moment when reading, could not recommend enough.