Book- The Collected Short Stories (JR)

Book- The Collected Short Stories

Author: Jean Rhys

Score: 6/10

Year:  1987 (1st edition) ; 1992 (this edition)

Publisher : Simon and Schuster ( W.W. Norton & Company)

ISBN : 978-0-393-30625-5

Pages 406

Language : English

This collection of 51 short stories brings together 36 stories that were published in 1927 (the left bank), 1968 (tigers are better-looking) and 1976 (sleep it off, lady), adding 3 short stories that had never been published in collections before.

This means that 12 others were but elsewhere than the 3 volumes mentioned.

And as we have so many stories, all different from each other, and whose compositions span decades, I notice a great inequality in the narrative quality - especially for the first period, where certain stories seemed to me to contain several stories, without real connections, in a narrative jumble, where sentences and paragraphs seemed to come out of nowhere, without reason, or link to what had just been said...

The other stories are better written, with beginnings, middles, and ends more clearly defined and connected.

Jean Rhys, the author, had lived in London, Paris and the Caribbean, and set all of the stories in these cities, with rare exceptions.

We see the reflection of his own tumultuous life, with the 2 main leitmotifs of this work: poverty, and relationships without love, even toxic in certain short stories.

She also speaks often but not systematically of various indifferences, some of which have tragic consequences - and I warn that these stories do not spare emotional shocks sometimes, and content triggers to be seen at the end of this review.

I loved certain stories, which deserve the term favorite; others barely crossed my mind, and so, as I said in the title, there are some short stories that are superb, even small narrative gems, lacking neither emotion nor humor ( sometimes chilling, or black), but the others are average, or disordered.

Trigger warning section:

Some stories mention death, even suicide.

One (Rapunzel, Rapunzel) even has emetophobic triggers.

List of the short stories included : 

1. Illusion 
2. A spiritualist
3. From a French prison
4. In a café
5. Tout Montparnasse and a lady
6. Mannequin
7. In the Luxemburg Gardens
8. Tea with an artist
9. Trio
10. Mixing cocktails
11. Again the Antilles
12. Hunger
13. Discourse of a lady standing a dinner to a down-and-out friend
14. A night
15. In the Rue de l'Arriveé
16. Learning to be a mother
17. The blue bird
18. The grey day
19. The Sidi
20. At the Villa d'Or
21. La grosse Fifi
22. Vienne
23. Till September Petronella
24. The day they burned the books
25. Let them call it jazz
26. Tigers are better-looking
27. Outside the machine
28. The lotus
29. A solid house
30. The sound of the river
31. I spy a stranger
32. Temps perdi
33. Pioneers, oh, pioneers
34. Good-bye Marcus, good-bye Rose
35. The bishop's feast
36. Heat
37. Fishy waters
38. Overture and beginners please
39. Before the deluge
40. On not shooting sitting birds
41. Kikimora
42. Night out 1925
43. The chevalier of the Place Blanche
44. The insect world
45. Rapunzel, Rapunzel
46. Who knows what's up in the attic?
47. Sleep it off lady
48. I used to live here once
49. Kismet
50. The whistling bird
51. Invitation to the dance.