Customer Reviews

Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, Wide Sargasso Sea)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

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..

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.

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.

Wide Sargasso Sea fails to hit the mark. The writing is nice, the scenes near the waterfall, and at first there appears to be much promise. However, the message is more literary and lacks - in my opinion - an engrossing storyline. I say this in case someone expects a great read with a "current" feel. That is not what this book is about. Nevertheless, it is an interesting look on how many ways a person might become isolated, and sometimes the isolation manifests itself in the places one least expects. I have enclosed an essay I wrote on Wide Sargasso Sea for an Eng 226 Brit Lit class.



Islands Within; Grace Without

Rhys' protagonist Antoinette is beset by many outside forces. The unique racial, financial, and geographical identity of Antoinette assures that her voice will most often be lost and isolated. She is neither black nor white, not quite always rich but neither destined to be poor. As a result, Antoinette's isolation is complex and extensive. It is exists on many levels. She is both the victim and cause; a cruel and self-perpetuating cycle. It is possible that Antoinette has the will to change things, but that possibility is most likely intertwined with an inability to be humble; to forgive. In this aspect, Antoinette's greatest obstacle is Antoinette solely.
These characteristics find a fertile breeding ground in the isolation experienced by Antoinette. The blacks do not accept her as an equal, nor do the whites. At times she is poorer than one of her class should be, and at other times she has no access to the money which is rightfully hers. She is trapped in a limbo; not quite this, and never that. Rhys' development of Antoinette's isolation is crucial to establishing one of Antoinette's most negative characteristics; a bitter heart.
Yet the isolation is not Antoinette's fault. Neither is her color, financial status nor place of birth. It just is, and that is crucial to understanding that while people might have some extent of control over their own lives, there will always be outside factors to account for; the will of others, mother-nature, and chance. These factors speak to the human faculties of pity and forgiveness. In Antoinette's case the reader is torn between pity and contempt. A highly conflicting emotion gets to the root of Rhys' intent. On one hand, mankind has a difficult time pitying those without pity for others. Yet on the other hand it is easy to empathize with those poor souls so isolated from simple fraternization; those eternal outsiders of foul circumstance.
Such is the lot of Antoinette. She will never find a home and will always be a lost soul; an isolated exile on a wide sea or a confined island. She will be ruled by her fears, afraid to be amongst those lesser than her but even more afraid to be lesser in the eyes of those higher than her. From this perspective, despite the fortunes which seem to have blessed her life, Antoinette is truly the poorest person of all on the island of Jamaica.
Rhys is describing a world in which natural and societal forces are collectively more powerful than mankind. She is describing islands within islands, compounding isolation and hatred into a self-effacing crucible of despair. And yet even though mankind may feel forsaken by a world that cares not for the plight of man and offers little in the way of hope, there still exists the most sacred of choices to man; whether or not he can act with tolerance and forgiveness to his brother. This choice alone is owned by both the highest and lowest; it is uniquely human. And although the actions of forgiveness and tolerance may seem petty, they may be enough to ensure that God's grace bridges the gap of isolation on a Wide Sargasso Sea.