Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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My loneliest book tag will still go to Carson McCullers’‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’, a far more artistic tale of loneliness, isolation, and senselessness of life. The calmness of this novel reminds me of On the Beach where the people who are left alive are resigned to their fate and are trying to enjoy the last few days of their lives. There is no pell-mell race for safety, because there is no safety. The publisher is also making connections to the recent post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven even to the extent of using very similar cover art. This is a mature work with tight prose and elegant observations. Brooks-Dalton even manages to make me like Augustine by finding the spark of humanity in him that was always smothered by his brilliance. Issacharoff, Jess. 2013. ‘“No Pride, No Name, No Face, No Country”:Jewishness and National Identity in Good Morning, Midnight’ in Mary Wilson, ed., Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 111-129 Augustine knew only about the distant stars, billions of miles away. He'd been moving from place to place his entire life and had never bothered to learn anything about the cultures or wildlife or geography that he encountered, the things right in front of him. They seemed passing, trivial. His gaze had always been far-flung. He'd accumulated local knowledge only by accident. While his colleagues explored the regions of their various research posts, hiking in the woods or touring the cities, Augustine only delved deeper into the skies, reading every book, every article that crossed his path, and spending seventy-hour weeks in the observatory, trying to catch a glimpse of thirteen billion years ago, scarcely aware of the moment he was living in…When he considered how long he had been alive, it seemed remarkable how little he had experienced.

Good Morning, Midnight - Penguin Books UK

You worked as a mannequin?’ Down and up his eyes go, up and down. ‘How long ago was this?’ he says. Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....” Finally, the passage ends with Sasha unable to discern events in time. Perhaps, due to her nervousness, this is understandable. However, this also acts as a barometer for the rest of the novel. As Sasha descends down her inevitable road to ruin, memories begin to overtake her. She loses sight of her mask and the masks she assigns to others. By the end of the novel, present and past intertwine as she willingly slips into a final abyss from which she will not return.sully has also chosen career over family; leaving behind an ex-husband and a resentful daughter who doesn't understand how desperately she needed to follow this calling, assuming there would be time in the "someday" to reconnect. like augustine, sully doesn't feel the connection with people that comes so naturally to others, but in the claustrophobic confines of the ship and the apprehension of the future, she finally finds the comfort to be had in community.

Good Morning, Midnight Study Guide | Literature Guide - LitCharts

He treated her like a pet because he didn't know what else to do - with clumsy kindness, but as a specimen of a different species. He fed her when he fed himself. Talked to her when he felt like talking. Took her for walks. Gave her things to play with or look at: a walkie-talkie, a constellation map, a musty sachet of potpourri he'd found in an empty drawer, an Arctic field guide. He did his best, which he knew wasn't very good, but - she didn't belong to him and he wasn't the sort of man who adopted strays. Two stories told in parallel - one being of Augie and Iris who have been abandoned at a remote station in the Arctic circle. V. S. Naipaul wrote in 1973 that it is "the most subtle and complete of [Rhys'] novels, and the most humane." [4]

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Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.” Loneliness is a powerful emotion, yet you can feel just as lonely while spending time with people, or in the middle of a crowd, as you might when you're completely alone. Lily Brooks-Dalton's powerful, haunting, contemplative debut novel, Good Morning, Midnight, is a meditatio The structural elements that Rhys repeats within the novel reveal a conflict at the heart of the narrative. The repetition of a daily routine helps Sasha to navigate her life in the present, yet there is a constant friction with the darker side of repetition, and the difficulty in escaping the routines imposed by time and experience: This would seem to indicate a small breakthrough. After all, Sasha admits that she does not care what other people think of her hat. However, she still takes the time to observe the faces of the other patrons in the restaurant. If she really did not care what they thought, she would not have bothered to look for their reactions. More disturbing still, as Joy Castro argues in her critical essay, “Jean Rhys,” Sasha’s attempts at transformation “can be seen as a complete erasure of Sasha’s personality.” Castro sees Sasha’s hair dye, in particular, as the “final relinquishment of individual vision, of the ability to perceive (if not control) her own life in an original way” (20). As discussed previously, there are numerous moments throughout the novel which indicate the sense that Sasha’s routines cannot be the comfort she seeks. Even her rooms no longer ‘hide [her] from the wolves outside:’

Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice

it's a slow-moving, highly descriptive book that makes the reader feel the weight of the emptiness and the terrible beauty of a silent world. it's so beautifully written that i can excuse the heavy-handedness of its treatment of coincidence and reveals. i may have rolled my eyes at one point, but for a debut novel, this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker - it just needed a little more finesse in handling those parts, and she handled the resolution well, avoiding a happy-slappy unrealistic ending. except for those few clunky bits, it's a very strong book. Schwarz, Bill. 2003. ‘Introduction: Crossing the Seas’ in Bill Schwarz, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain(Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 1-30 And how did Sully’s parents - emotionally and physically distant - affect the way she treated her own daughter? But it also acts as a mask to stop the world looking in, just as the routines do. This is why the type of room becomes so important to Sasha, and why she places so much hope in finding the right place. It’s her way of feeling like she belongs: No man is an island and author Brooks-Dalton makes a persuasive demonstration of the need for human attachment as scientists – self aware and too often selfish of their work and prioritizing that work over human connections - find themselves cut off from the rest of humanity after an ambiguous loss. The old saying that “you never know what you had until you lose it” is a fitting axiom for the writer’s meaning.

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This book is mostly character driven, rather than plot driven- ( which I enjoyed - as I tend to be more relationship oriented than I am hard core science fiction oriented)....