The most enduring result of my first-semester first-year English course, aside from a healthy disdain for both DH Lawrence and James Joyce, was a love of Jean Rhys. I haven't read Good Morning, Midnight since I was 17... and a lot more callow than I realised at the time.

Reading at this at 40 was, unsurprisingly, a whole other thing.

The first thing that I have to say is that whoever wrote the blurb for the Penguin edition really didn't understand it. In the first sentence they very bluntly set out two things that are serious revelations in the book; and then the last sentence of the summary is just wrong. I don't know whether they read the book and didn't get it, or whether the summary was written from third-hand information, or what. But what I can say is: don't read this blurb. It's also deeply unsympathetic, which made me cranky. 

Sasha is in Paris. It's the late 1930s, and she's been in a bad way, but she's better now. Honest. As she walks around Paris, much of the novel is taken up with reminiscing - about being in Paris in the heady post-war days when she was a Bright Young Thing, or living like it anyway. The Sasha doing the remembering is a bit older than I am now. She has lived a lot, experienced joy and tragedy, struggled with identity - all the things you would expect for someone in her late 40s. 

There's little action in this novel - and let's be honest, that makes it a bit unusual for me. It's a deeply internal novel, although it never gets to self-indulgent navel-gazing. It's an emotional novel, although it never tried to make the reader experience wild and tumultuous feelings: it balances the line between clinical - here's what happened - and drawing the portrait of Sasha's experiences so finely that honestly, at the end, I felt a bit exhausted. It's short; I read it in a day. And when I finished I had to go dig out the bottle of Pernod from the back of the cupboard and sit and have a quiet drink. (Sasha drinks a lot of Pernod in her time in Paris.) Rhys writes so... matter-of-factly about life, and the difficulties of life. Her genius is in not making it melodramatic and also not detached. 

In an odd way I see a connection between this and The City We Became; Paris is an integral part of the novel. The places Sasha goes, and the influence cafes and faubourgs and parks have on her mood - it reminds us that a place isn't always only, or just, a place; it's a trigger for emotions and memory, sometimes even a repository of them. As with The City, I don't know Paris - I've visited once but didn't invest in the place that deeply. I can only imagine what it would be like reading this as someone who knows the area. 

I love this book. It's not likely to be one I re-read every year; I'm not sure I have the emotional resilience for that. But every few years, now that I'm reminded of it? Absolutely. 

If you are looking for a light and cheerful read, then this book is not for you. It's about a depressed and lonely woman living in Paris in the 30s. I am a sucker for books like this, seeing the other side of life in Paris when you are poor and lonely.
I liked the descriptions of cheap hotel rooms, the bars, and the strange characters that she meets. So my 4 stars are in response to a very personal view of the novel, and I would only recommend it those readers who have a liking for such dark, intense books.

Easily one of the best books I've read in a long time. Perhaps since reading Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar', as I did find quite a lot of similarities - if you liked that, you'll like this. If you're a fan of stream of consciousness writing, you'll like this.

I was in love with all aspects of this book. But overall, it was such an interesting insight into a woman's mind and her incredible insights into other people's minds. I ended up reading majority of the book in one night, because I couldn't put it down.

This is perhaps the greatest novel ever written about human fragility, fear, and the plight of arriving at middle age without a partner or a family as an emotional safety net, what we might call middle-aged solitude. At least I have not read its better.

Over the last year-and-a-half or so I've been reading Jean Rhys's novels in order (with the exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, which I've read a few times in different contexts). Good Morning, Midnight, sadly, for me, is the last--the cap of the cycle of her early novels. (Although I still have her Collected Short Stories to read.) Each of the first four novels centered on the tribulations of young female protagonist of the first half of the twentieth century struggling to get on to tomorrow without much means in a world in which women pretty much either married or prostituted themselves in order to survive. While each of the four novels, from Voyage in the Dark to Good Morning, Midnight, are very well written and deeply moving, this is, for me, the one that packed the greatest punch. This one feels the most raw, the most abstract, the freest of literary convention, and, therefore, perversely, both the most mannered and, at the same time, the most pure and emotionally honest.

Such a response only goes to show how much we trust literary conventions and, specifically, the conventions of the narrative structures of the novel. To be free of convention, in such a codified world of classically-structured narratives, is to be mannered. We know from the introduction to The Complete Novels that it was important to Rhys not to use "tricks" in writing. Therefore the narrative anomalies here--time slips, contextual explanations omitted, the sketchy, episodic nature of the narrative as a whole--are meant to be honest representations of her protagonist's experience rather than examples of the author's literary sleight-of-hand. Although, in a novel, these might actually amount to about the same thing. Still, the effects of these dis-junctions--what other readers may well read as narrative sloppiness or unwelcome affectations--actually made Good Morning, Midnight my favorite of the four early novels, because I took these dis-junctions as representations of the narrator's (if not the author's) emotional nudity, the tale's rawness, elements that had remained somewhat more contained in the first three novels. Here Rhys takes no prisoners--everyone walks up the gallows' steps and faces the hangman. No emotion is sublimated, ignored, avoided, or wished away, each is taken to the end of the night, to bed, and even into the protagonist's dreams.

Still, I sympathize with the more impatient reader who may well find this novel weak, even whiny. Human frailty or fragility is not for everyone. It opens our empathy and it disgusts us by turns. My own life has been rather shaken over the course of the last month and I've been reminded several times how tenuous is my own existence/place in the world, so I identified with rather than criticized or judged our fearful and desperate protagonist. I can see the other side, but I salute the author who choses to write about the vulnerability that perhaps many prospective readers simply never feel--lucky sods that they are.

A previous reviewer accurately compared this to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer wherein a young man sleeps his way around Paris living a bohemian life, only, this is the dark side of that mirror from a female perspective. Written as a stream of conscious narrative, the narrator slowly descends into a mental health crisis after being jilted and experiencing a profound loss with no support system. The loss of self, the loss of lucid thinking, the inability to find connection, and disillusionment with men and life as perceived by a fracturing young mind is captured in a painfully empathic way. Powerful and so sad.

Everyone knows Jean Rhys because of her literary sensation 'Wide Sargasso Sea' which is on my TBR.
Good Morning, Midnight I'm guessing the title is taken from the Emily Dickinson poem and is about the portrayal of Sophia Jansen and her personal tragedy.
Did I enjoy the book? Honestly I didn't it was predictable and melancholic...but saying that I honestly think the rep of mental health was done to a high standard. Rhys' capture of grief and loneliness it gave me vibes of Plath and Rooney. It was raw and authentic and knowing when this novel was published I can't imagine it would have been easy to do. I think after reading the Afterword the novel made a lot more sense to me and highlighted Rhys' portrayal of women and feminism in the novel.

Quotes/
'Everything in their bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés - there's no hope.'

'It's a strange feeling - when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always, it's like what death must be.'

ED Poem-
Good morning, Midnight!
I'm coming home,
Day got tired of me-
How could I of him?

Sunshine was a sweet place,
I liked to stay -
But Morn didn't want me -now-
So good night, Day!