This featured a clearly mentally unwell woman who muses on her tragic past and obsesses about herself, her appearance, and men, and sex with men, while drinking vast amounts of alcohol and resenting the fact that she has very little money. She was very occasionally dryly funny, but otherwise everyone and everything was unpleasant, unlikable, hostile.

Possibly the most depressing book I have ever read (and I've read 'A Little Life'). ( )

This is a deceptively short and easy book. While it can be read quickly, the constant morphing of reality makes the simple story difficult to read, to the point where the ending hovers between a dream-state and reality. Alcohol, despair, and loneliness are all themes that permeate this novel and while it is bleak and grim, it is also punctuated with hope and liveliness, which brings the reader back for more... only to create a vortex back into the depths of sadness.

While I can't say I loved the book, it certainly didn't leave me indifferent, more a sense of unease than a revelation of the human heart. There was also a feeling that none of us are immune to such a fate. ( )

A story about a woman who has been hurt and used by her husband, who no longer believes in anything or anybody, and would just as soon die as anything. Surprise ending. ( )

Having read After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and Sleep It Off, Lady, this book wears out its welcome fairly quickly. We have another broke (but not really!) woman living in semi-squalor in Paris, unable to befriend other women and terrified (but not really!) of becoming involved with men.

It all wears pretty thin. Making things worse, in this novel, is Rhys clearly demonstrating just how incompetent and mentally unstable the narrator is: she works in a boutique, yet cannot find the cashier because she is too flustered after her ability to perform simple tasks is questioned; she takes a man back to her hotel, makes him leave once they have started to get down to business, then frantically wishes for him to return and finish the job; she tries her hand at guiding tourists, and does not know any of the places they ask her to take them; she tries to impress two foreigners and ends up taking them to a cafe where she is despised by the staff. All this in the midst of copious drinking and feeling sorry for herself.

Yawn. It worked better when it was tragic; here, it just feels inevitable. ( )

Good Morning, Midnight is the story of a young woman’s plunge into depression and loneliness in the years following World War I. Sasha Jensen, an English woman, who had spent the years immediately following the war with her husband, Enno, a Frenchman, in Paris, finds herself back there retracing her steps through their old haunts and reliving her past. Paris does not seem to be a city of lights in Rhys novel, but one of seediness and gutter trolling.

I’m not sure what I should say about this novel. I had read that it was vaguely autobiographical, and I sincerely hope that is not the case, for this is a book of so much despair and darkness that it was a struggle to continue to read. It is not melancholy that drives Sasha, it is utter despair, and how a person with this little connection to life keeps living is beyond explanation. The ending was just too, too bizarre and awful for my tastes. The haunting promise of the Dickinson poem the title is derived from came flashing to my mind.

Rating the book is equally difficult, because there is not one thing about it I could say I liked, but I can recognize the emotional investment Rhys has made in her character. I thought of [b:A Farewell to Arms|10799|A Farewell to Arms|Ernest Hemingway|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1313714836l/10799._SY75_.jpg|4652599], because the desolation of the ending of that novel seems to permeate this one, but while Hemingway is fairly straightforward in the telling of his tale, Rhys writes in the most meandering way, with random thoughts that require a re-read sometimes just to make sure you have caught the sense of them. And, there is the temptation to believe that she mostly wanted to shock her audience by forcing them to view the depravity of the post-war Parisian society.

Perhaps this was just too much of an intellectual and emotional investment for me at this moment in time, or maybe this is Rhys taken too far into herself for my pleasure. I enjoyed [b:Wide Sargasso Sea|25622780|Wide Sargasso Sea|Jean Rhys|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453021061l/25622780._SY75_.jpg|142647] and think of it fondly, but that was written by an older, perhaps more mellow Rhys. This book was written in 1939, and having come through one World War, Rhys could surely see the world standing at the threshold of the second. I doubt I will think of this book again, and if I do there will not be any fondness. When I closed the cover, I believe the sensation I was feeling was nausea.
( )