Reviews for Some Monday for sure

The average rating for Some Monday for sure based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-12-27 00:00:00 Bobby Dee Not long ago I read 'Tigers Are Better Looking' which was a collection of short stories I really liked, and the first time I'd read Rhys' short fiction. Sleep it off lady I found to be even better, and I now realise Rhys was just as much an accomplished short story writer as she was a novelist. These brilliant sketches move, as she herself did, from the West Indies of her childhood to England to Montparnasse and back again. Here's a taste of what's on offer - The island of Dominica in the 1890's, a sleepy British empire outpost. From England appears Mr. Ramage, a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee. A young girl, Rosalie, falls in love with him, dreams about him, follows every detail of his increasing alienation and madness. He marries a not very nice girl, then retreats to a dilapidated plantation, walks around naked, and threatens a crowd with a shotgun. It doesn't end well for him. Then, there is Captain Cardew, one of those ebullient Victorian gentlemen, a hero of some bygone war. Under the trees in the Botanical Gardens, he caresses the breasts of Lolita aged Phoebe, and rabbits on to her about love and lovers. Nothing comes of it, but it does changes her outlook. Now she knows that there is something else beside collecting your trousseau, getting married, and having three nice children. That being a life of wickedness, and of excitement. 'Fishy Waters' is manly about the trial of Jimmy Longa, a befuddled English workman caught while threatening to saw a badly beaten little black girl in two with his carpenter's saw. But, midway in the story, the inferences of guilt begin to shift subtly, in the direction of her rescuer, Mr. Penrice, a respectable, prosperous family man. Then in London in the 1910's and Paris in the 1920's we have Daisie an incredibly beautiful understudy in a musical whose voice and beauty never seem to project across the footlights, where she falls unconscious at even the slightest reverse. 'The Chevalier of the Place Blanche' sees an embezzling clerk in a travel agency who has gentlemanly pretensions'he can, he finds, have Margaret, the English girl, and her money too, until she says the one thing that will cut down his shabby remnant of pride. The last story in the book, 'I Used to Live Here Once' is one of the best in the book. It's a ghost story, and I don't even like ghost stories, so that shows just what an effect it had on me. These are some of the themes and the people, but no thumbnails of plot can transmit the particular twang of Jean Rhys's uncomplicated and engaging style, or her splendid ability to choose what is said and to let the unsaid speak. The fact that the scenes themselves come from the West Indies or London or Paris of past decades has little bearing here, as like some of her novels these are very modern stories written with a quick, young sensibility. Whether in the small hours of the morning or at the fag end of the day, Rhys makes herself truly felt, resulting in a collection of stories that I greatly admired.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-29 00:00:00 Khriss Vinson The late Jean Rhys remains my favourite writer ever and this selection of her work shines as only her words can. There was no one like her before, nor has there been anyone since. Her wry, brutally honest, self-deprecating voice is so beautifully tormented she's irresistible whatever your gender. She grabs you by the heart, chews you up and spits you out, somehow leaving you begging for more. The heart wrenching title story sums up the book brilliantly, an excellent tale to choose. As with most of Rhys' work, a common thread in this collection is the theme of the displaced woman, the foreigner, the outsider, the stranger to this strange world of ours. We so readily take her into our hearts, understand and empathise completely. Her issues are ones most people have had at some time or other but few have conveyed so succinctly. These are the short works of an underrated enigma, in my opinion, who took my breath away from the first word, of the first page, of the first book I read of hers. This was the last of her fiction that I read, completing her life works. Unsurprisingly, she maintained her hypnotic hold over me to the last word. That was when I decided to start over and read her from scratch, every word, line, every book that she ever had published. If you get one fleeting chance in a lifetime to read this cult status legend, you'd be nuts to consider letting it pass.