my tragic right hip

I’ve been listening to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, one of the girls in the car up to conference brought it along, and it’s lovely, aching, heartfelt, broken, all the things a good record should be (there are a couple of songs that are just okay but for the most part, the whole album is really crisp). And I just finished reading Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys. For some reason, the two fit so well together, the lonely, rough voice of Amy’s music echoes exceptionally well the narrative voice of Sophia Jansen, the protagonist of this strange little novel.

Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of my favourite books, and I’ve also read Voyage in the Dark, but years ago, so it’s not as fresh as the latter, which I’ve read three or four times in my lifetime now. But this novel isn’t as coherent as the other two, Good Morning, Midnight‘s stream of consciousness narrative is hard to follow sometimes; it’s as confused, pained and as troubled as the narrator herself.

Faintly the story of a struggling single girl who has escaped a tragedy only to attempt and drink herself to death, there’s little in Paris for Sophia (or sometimes Sasha) beyond the cafes and the chicken scratches of an everyday existence to keep her alive. Abandoned by life itself, she wanders through the days in a wine-soaked state and drowns her dreams in Luminol in the evenings. Profoundly sorrowful, Rhys’s novel vacillates between the utter beauty of modernism and a very true feeling of drowing. French inter-mixed with English, past mingled with present, real life confused with the stuff of dreams, it’s hard not to ache when following Sophia stumbling down the street or listening to her rant hysterically to the men who become her companions.

As with all the books I read in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, a trend seems to be evolving, where displaced (or replaced, or happily emigrated?) authors tell stories not of their native land (in Rhys’s case, Dominica) but of their adopted homelands or even of places wild in their own imaginations. The setting for this novel is post-First World War Paris, just before the onslaught of the next devastating conflict. There’s evidence of many displaced persons within the book, refugees from life like Sophia herself, who find themselves all searching for money and acceptance. But all in all it’s the ache in Rhys’s writing that holds me tight in my place, her delicate way of describing situations, and her flighty use of metaphor, which makes me want to give up writing all together, find a bottle and romantically walk the streets of Paris wearing chunky heels and a new coat, and then fall into a shabby hotel only to wake up the next day and do it all over again.

Wholly deserving being found on page 402 of my 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Fully captured in the feeling of heartbreak and ideal reading on the plane ride to Paris.

There’s a bookshop next door, which advertises second-hand English novel. The assistant is Hindu. I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes – a book like a flat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it. But he insists on selling me lurid stories of the white-slave traffic. ‘This is a very good book, very beautiful, most true.’