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

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.

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.

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.

The book seemed to me to capture very well the mood swings of an alcoholic woman in difficult and impoverished circumstances in the period setting - but from a bohemian point of view. There's the problem of how to read such a book without it depressing you (I had the same problem with Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano"). The bohemian setting redeemed it a little. But my main problem with this book is that falls so far short of her marvellous "Wide Sargasso Sea". It's simply not the same quality of writing. Because it is Written

very different read - quite depressing but all the same clever - much is said with no plot and very scant characters - I really enjoyed it but it might not suit everyone

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.’

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

Cracking little book and great value

“How on earth can you say why you love people? You might as well say you know where the lighting is going to strike. At least that’s how it has always seemed to me.” For a long time, I thought of “Wide Sargasso Sea” only when hearing the name Jean Rhys, but the synopsis wasn’t as intriguing to me. Instead, my eyes landed on this short book - an author I’d already heard great things about, an intriguing title; I was sold. “Good Morning, Midnight” is interesting in itself. An Oxymoron for the sake of catching the reader’s attention? Total opposites to raise questions in people’s minds? “Good Morning, Midnight” focuses on a young woman’s experiences in the middle of Paris, fighting loneliness in a city she fled to in order to escape personal tragedies. While searching for self-determination and independence, she encounters cheap hotel rooms, all looking the same but each more depressing than the one prior, and men of whom she expects nothing and, least of all, understanding and kindness. Jean Rhys’s prose is much more than just beautiful and deserves, even demands, to be read. It is quite funny how we can see ourselves in a literary character in the 30s. Running away from our problems, even moving countries, dying our hair blonde on a random Thursday evening just because we felt like it, running from one café to another to kill time. The writing was very stream-of-consciousness, perfectly fitting the character and my own mind. There was no direct plot to follow, only this very messed up female protagonist. I devoured every single page, and just like our main character, I expected nothing and just went with the flow.

I loved the novel, but the binding from its print is weak. I’m really hard on my books. I put creases in the spines and I fold my books over. The pages in this book started to fall out. This doesn’t happen normally for me. Most of the time my book just gets deformed. I’ll probably buy this book again just so I can have one with a better spine and not have loose pages. Obviously this is not the sellers fault, but something to keep in mind if you are hard with your books. The novel itself is experimental. Rhys does a fantastic job of getting the reader in Sasha head. The ending did cause me discomfort. It’s a pretty disturbing ending.

Story of a female anti-hero living in 1930s Paris. This book feels so modern like written just few years ago.Extremely sad at times but wonderfully humane with flaws.Guys who are looking for a sad women tales of imperfection and details of paris, this book is best for you.

A very good read. I passed it on to our building library.