Viaggio nel buio

‘ They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval. ’ While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. Jean Rhys Leggi tutto

Dry and minimalist, Voyage in the Dark sketches a nuanced portrait of a girl unable to grow up. Anna’s a fatherless teenaged chorus girl recently sent from the West Indies to England by her aloof step mother. Rather than follow the path allotted to her, she opts to hook up with older men for money a Leggi tutto

Jean Rhys, rediscovered treasure, gives us depression in all its gruesome splendor in "Voyage in the Dark." The hapless victim of said undiagnosed malady goes a 'lil bonkers living out her reclusive/bohemian lifestyle in dreary London of olde. This novel seems like a natural companion to Kate Chopin' Leggi tutto

Surely not another unhappy in love female protagonist who's nights end in turmoil? Yep. I shouldn't be surprised really. Novel number three for Rhys and it's more of the same. Anna Morgan is a long way from home, transitioning from her childhood in the West Indies into her miserable life in London.

After the death of her father, young Anna Morgan must relocate to England where she works as a chorus girl in rundown theaters and resides in a moldy boarding room. Fortune arrives in the form of an older man who elevates her living situation and engages with her in a sexual dalliance. Anna falls in Leggi tutto

I grew to rely on the out of body life. If you could step outside yourself and put your hands to fit with your other hand on the glass like in one of those movies of a prison visit. The living your life in memories after and not ever during. The tingles and the shivers of the skin that's all ghost l Leggi tutto

SOME NOTES ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL Autobiographical novels – they should all of them be loaded onto one of those huge barges that take garbagey rubbish out into the ocean and set on fire and the charred remains dumped somewhere ecologically safe, anywhere, so long as I don’t have to look at the Leggi tutto

"..είμαι όλες τούτες οι λέξεις, όλες τούτες οι άγνωστες, όλος τούτος ο μπουχός από λέξεις, χωρίς έδαφος να κατακάτσει, χωρίς ουρανό να διαλυθεί, που κολλάνε για να πουν, ξεκολλάνε για να πουν, πως εγώ είμαι αυτές, όλες αυτές, κι αυτές που ενώνονται, κι αυτές που χωρίζονται, κι αυτές που δε γνωρίζοντ Leggi tutto

” At the door she turned round and said, ‘I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know.’I didn’t answer. My heart was beating like hell. I lay down and started thinking about the time when I was ill in Newcastle, and the room I had there, and that story about the walls of a room getting smalle Leggi tutto

This is a fascinating insight (heavily autobiographical) into the flighty and insecure world of a chorus girl in London, around the time of the first world war (though war is never mentioned). Many other books set in this period feature chorus girls, but usually in a peripheral way that makes their