Penguin Modern Classics

176 pages, $5.55

Review by Aria Aber

The first time I read Good Morning, Midnight was during my quarantine in a single hospital bedroom immediately after a New Year’s Eve party. My exclusion from the exterior world and the corollaries of my comedown facilitated a hefty journey into the depths of this underrated, forgotten little book. I couldn’t help but think of my grandmother, who believes that humans, if seen through the clarity of simple eyes, are, at their innermost core, emotionally tied to only one of the following: sad or happy. I don’t want to encourage anyone to follow this psychologically ignorant analysis, but I do praise its applicability whenever I encounter someone who has actually read a Jean Rhys novel apart from Wide Sargasso Sea (to which they were probably forced during an academic excursion) and enjoyed it. If they did, chances are they are somehow… sad. Not 2005 self-harm-glorifying Emo sad, but melancholy. It’s obvious that unlucky, poverty-stricken, white Creole writer Jean Rhys was one of the sad ones herself. You don’t have to be born into the wrong caste or know what it feels like to have to steal your lunch at the supermarket in order to understand Rhys – but you have to be receptive to the melancholy in everything: in ‘afternoon light’, in sunrises, in dancing under confetti storms, in ice cream, and even in grandparent couples who lovingly smile at each other. But this isn’t the only reason why I can’t quit reading about a depressed alcoholic woman in her mid-50s haunting Parisian streets between the World Wars. It’s because it’s wonderfully crafted, intensely poetic and brutally relevant … even today, almost 80 years after its publication. Continue reading →