Quartet [Hardcover]

Jean Rhys (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1971

The story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

If difficulty of subject is to be considered in judging the merit of a novel, Miss Rhys must be accredited with high achievement. Not only does she deal with the most complex personalities, exploring the most intimate recesses of their psychology, but she does so with the directness and certitude of the fine artist. The style, especially of the dialogue, belongs to the new tradition in prose, which shuns elaboration for sharpness and intensity of effect. (New York Times ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Jean Rhys is the author of Wide Sargasso Sea and other novels. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 186 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row (1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060135379
• ISBN-13: 978-0060135379
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,187,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "voila pour toi," said stephan, February 13, 2005

By 

lady detective "sakura kitty" (east coat) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Quartet (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

you're in your late twenties.

you used to be a chorus girl.

you know your husband is into something shady, but you don't ask.

you like the money, and he is kind. so when he's arrested and you're left to fend for yourself alone in paris, without any money, you take comfort in an older married couple, who open up their purses and home, allowing you to get a bit comfy.

the husband wants to sleep with you & the wife says it's cool. you protest, half-heartedly & do it anyway.

the husband's a cad; the wife is passive aggressive.

you don't leave.

you don't get a job.

you get depressed.

it just keeps getting worse.

you can't seem to pull yourself together.

you drink a lot

& cry

& act irrational

& ultimately the whole thing is cool & disturbing,

although you'd never say that,

it's your life after all.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Forget Me Knots, April 2, 2002

By 

Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quartet (Paperback)

Quartet was Jean Rhys' first novel. It is the story of Marya, a British expatriate living in Paris in the early part of the 20th century. She is acutely self-conscious and yet utterly incapable of changing her life to achieve happiness. Her life revolves around two men: Stephan, her vague Polish husband and HJ, a married British ex-pat who is extremely social and active in the arts. Marya's life has been pared down to essentials: dining, drinking, reading and waiting for her husband to return. When she finds Stephan has been unexpectedly arrested her attachment to him is disturbed. Craving affection and financial security, she desperately attempts to discover why Stephan has been arrested and how she can stay in contact with him. However, she quickly takes up with HJ and his wife, Lois. Her emotions become dangerously tangled between the two. Meandering through defeat after defeat entirely unsatisfied and pining for the money to pay for her rent and a glass of brandy, she ultimately has to face the consequences of her love affair. Marya is vaguely dissatisfied and compulsively tragic. In her life which closely parallels Rhys' own, she finds no remission for the terribly existential fact of life.

In this novel Rhys subtly satirizes her affair with Ford Madox Ford and the life she led with him in Paris. This time of great artistic innovation is reduced to the bare facts of the debased livelihood of the expatriates: their drinking and intertwining sexual affairs. Rhys is unremittingly spare in her emotional honesty. Her prose are hollowed out just as the main character's personality is hollowed out. There is nothing tender about this fictitious recreating. It is brutal, just as Rhys' vision of life. Emotions seep out in sporadic bursts and the rest is contemptuously smoking a cigarette and watching passers by. But the gaze of Marya's is incredibly telling. Her feelings are projected outward onto the people surrounding her. A man or woman witnessed walking by or sitting on the opposite side of a café will inhabit the emotions Marya does not allow to pool inside her. In this way, Rhys fiction is a strong precursor to Alain Robbe-Grillet's because of the intensely violent subjectivity of the character's perception of the world. The solemn nature of novel evokes powerful feelings of sympathy and sorrow.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tabloid story with an un-tabloid viewpoint, June 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Quartet (Norton Paperback Fiction) (Paperback)

A book well before its time (auugh! cliche!), "Quartet" explores the everyday cruelty that passes under cover of "sophisticated" bohemian culture. What haunts me after reading is the quiet, patient "voice" of the narrative, a heroine who is witty, perceptive but (alas) broke and under increasing pressure to adapt to her shallower, so-called "friends". There's brutal irony seeing a tabloid ending, KNOWING how the press will report this & how grotesquely wrong it will be, how hard it really is to "break through" to the sympathy (even, especially) of the "liberal" public