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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not to be Read When Already Downtrodden!,
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
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This review is from: Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, Wide Sargasso Sea) (Paperback)
Jean Rhys's first four novels are sequential, slightly fictionalized confessions of her own sad, sordid life.
[A stern warning to my teenage son: Stay clear of wistful waifs who exude sexy depression and masochistic neediness, especially if they seem to be talented with words; you won't like yourself in the novel they write about you.] Certainly Ford Madox Ford, a great unhappy writer on his own hook, would second that advice after reading the portrayal of his relationship with Jean Rhys in her second novel, Quartet. Rhys's first four novels - Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackensie, and Good Morning Midnight - are all essentially chapters in her self-excoriating semi-autobiography, the agonizing tale of her life-spiral into degradation and suicidal depression. As a pretty-but-not-beautiful young white girl from the Afro-Caribbean island of Dominica, our heroine takes one step toward shaping her life by de-exiling herself to England. From that step on, it's all adrift, from sexual exploitation (two-way) to exploitation, grimmer and grimier with each episode. She's a sad, sick kitty, this self-hating waif. She also writes with a poignant, painful realism that was way ahead of her time (the 1920s in London and Paris) in terms of confessional literature. There's something in almost every chapter of Rhy's fictionalized desolation that makes me want to run a few miles in the hills, take a cold shower, and listen to a Bach cantata to revitalize myself. There's also something so honest in her that I come back for more desperation on the page. The persona Rhys assigned herself in Voyage was more attractive, or at least more sympathetic, than the 'heroine' of Quartet. In fact, Rhy's fictional life becomes so tangibly unbearable by the end of Quartet that most readers will need a year or two before confronting the next episode, titled After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. Unfortunately, for this reader, the intense sincerity of despair that fills up the first two books of Rhy's confession gets formulaic and dispersed in the latter two, and I have little to say about them That's not what I expected when I bought the complete novels. I'd just spent two weeks in Dominica, hiking, snorkling, bird-watching on that beautiful volcanic cone of an island, where equal parts are blended of pitiful colonial detritus and indomitable Black joyousness. I'd never read a word of Rhys, but I noticed a shabby house with her name on a plaque in Roseau, the mildewed rubble-heap that passes for a port city. I expected something on the order of Jamaica Kincaid, or even better, the early hilarious novels of VS Naipaul. Ooo-wee, was I on the wrong track! I seldom urge people to read depressing novels or down-hearted poems. The world has a way of supplying each of us as much despair as we need. Rhys is an exception. Her sorrow is so pure than it exonerates her degraded life. I haven't read her last novel yet - Wide Sargasso Sea, written 30 years later and considered her masterpiece - but I will. If ever a life required a redemption, it was Jean Rhys's, and it would seem she achieved at least some redemption in writing..
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Complete Novels-Jean Rhys,
By Anne Frandi-Coory "Anne Marie Revill" (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, Wide Sargasso Sea) (Paperback)
Jean Rhys' novels (based on her life and including the classic 'Wide Sargasso Sea') are superbly written with an intense pathos, revealing the hardships single women experienced in Europe in the early 20th Century; loneliness, reliance on brief sexual relationships with various men for their living, difficult landladies, illegal abortions. Rhys, under several guises, daydreams and longs for her birthplace, and childhood,in the Caribbean. 'The Complete Novels' is enhanced throughout with magnificent and scene-setting photography by Brassai. Rhys also gives us a vivid picture of life in the Paris of the times.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Product and Seller Review,
By Ms Ellie (Western USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, Wide Sargasso Sea) (Paperback)
New Chapter Recycling, Inc., provided this book, which amazon shipped. This, then, is a seller review as well as a book review. The five stars are for the seller and the high quality of the book they sold me. I bought it knowing only that it was "used-very good." It is so much more. It was published in 1985 by W. W. Norton for the Quality Paperback Book Club, an offshoot of the Book of the Month Club. The pages have not changed color over the years, and the editing is first class: large print, attractive type faces, red letters for titles and red numbers for chapters, old black-and-white photos help establish the atmosphere. Norton even retained the English spelling and punctuation of the originals. If you want to read Jean Rhys's oeuvre, this is the book for you. Jean Rhys (1890-1979) wrote six novels and a number of short stories. She is famous for her sixth one, "Wide Sargasso Sea." This novella pretends to be the REAL story of Edward Rochester's first marriage. I am a big fan of Charlotte Brontė's "Jane Eyre." NOT a fan of Rhys's retelling. But what were her earlier novels like, I wondered? I will revise this review when I have read them.
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