Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys. Good Morning, Midnight.

Jean Rhys describes an English woman's life in Paris. The woman lives in a room, cries in public places. The people that the person interacts with cause negative feelings for that person. The woman, Sasha, hides in her room. She describes houses as monsters, a room as a protection from wolves. Her memories of her jobs are negative.

'What the hell is she doing here, that old woman?' 'What is she doing here that stranger, the alien, the old one?' She drinks with some Russians. She contemplates getting her hair dyed. She cries to her boss. She remembers spending time with a young man who's good at cards. She almost cries when she hears them say that while she's in Theodore's. She gives an old woman money for bread. She's aware of her 'extrovert', calling the couples in Theodore's 'individuals'. She vindicates what the woman said about her in Theodore's by imagining smashing their little heads with a hammer. She's supposed to meet the Russian guys somewhere at four, after she possibly dies her hair.

There's a flashback to when she's pregnant. She looks at her dead baby in the hospital. 'No wrinkle'.

A lot happens. No like major things happen though. She hangs out with Russians. She goes back to before she came to Paris. Some of the sections end like this: I'm in Paris. . . in Paris. . .

There's a part where someone spends time in her room with her. A younger girl. The girl came out of nowhere. I liked when the girl was there. I like what Sasha Jensen thought and said about the girl.

My favorite things about the book are how her emotions fluctuate within the shortly framed sections, how the paragraphs are short and the sentences are short. I could sense the voice of the character steering the emotions. This feels like parody and makes it apparent she worked on the novel for a nourishing amount of time. I think that the sentences make her more depressed; conceving them and rereading them. By expressing the energy in them they self-perpetuate despair. The whole idea of the book feels like a well documented period of inward reflection. Something bad happened and then all she wanted to do was write a book about living in a room in Paris and just the idea of that is depressing so it's like an explosion of depression. I like how it's short. There were no major climaxes. I liked when she went after the gigolo.

Sasha's drinking style, in the book, seems good. The descripitions of drinking aren't accessive. She indicates how her emotions are affected by the drinks. She doesn't 'over-do' blurry vision, vomiting, tastes, and or smells. It seems 'light' on the stomach but 'heavy' in the head. I feel like my own drinking affects my stomach before I can appreciate its effect in my head. I'm worried about my digestive system. I should conserve the use of my digestive system because it could get run-down and become infected or cancerous.

Enno. Rene. I like this book. The style was unique. Lavados. Bidet. Morocco.

Sasha holds her arm over her eyes because she doesn't want to see things that she knows will happen. She purposely stops herself from being affected by things her brain tells her are happening. She goes from happy to sad, sometimes in one short paragraph.

I'm afraid because I can't take insanity or depression seriously. I can't feel anything. Snowboarding is fun. Sometimes it can be lonely and more trouble than it is worth. The chairlift is sometimes boring.

I wonder how much of these things actually happened to Jean Rhys. I always wonder that about fiction writers and their work. Then sometimes I feel like I don't care about the writers lives. I think maybe she put the old bald woman in their because she's afraid of baldness, or maybe she thinks baldness is good and funny and she was parodying the social implications of baldness, or maybe she just saw a bald old woman before she was writing that day.

Someone wrote that they feel like Jean Rhys wrote is in despair and edited it in agony on goodreads. I like that prediction. It doesn't really matter. Maybe she was really happy when she wrote it and was looking back on a period of despair and agony.

The end made me think about what it's like for a woman to have sex, which I'll never fully know, but have thought about before (specifically when someone said they always have wondered what it's like for a woman to have sex while I was waiting with that person outside of a dormitory for a drug dealer five years ago).