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Quartet (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)

by Jean Rhys (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (3 Aug 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141183926
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141183923
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 270,714 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #16 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > R > Rhys, Jean

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Product Description

Product Description

Set in a superficially romantic, between-wars Paris, QUARTET is a poignant tale of a lonely woman. Set against a background of winter-wet streets, Pernod in smoky cafes and cheap hotel rooms with mauve- flowered wallpaper, Marya tries to make something substantial of her life in order to withstand the unreality of her surroundings. Alone, her Polish husband in prison, she is taken up by an English couple who slowly overwhelm her with their passions. Jean Rhys's first novel is both poignant anddisturbingly intimate in its vivid depiction of a woman on her own.


About the Author

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1894. Coming to England aged 16, she drifted into various jobs before starting to write in Paris in the late 1920's. QUARTET was first published as 'Postures' in 1928. Her novels, often portraying women as underdogsout to exploit their sexualities, were ahead of their time and only modestly successful. From 1939 she lived reclusively, and was largely forgotten when she made a sensational comeback with 'Wide Sargasso Sea' in 1966. She died in 1979.
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Quartet (Penguin Modern Classics)
66% buy the item featured on this page:
Quartet (Penguin Modern Classics) 4.0 out of 5 stars (2)
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Good Morning, Midnight (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Good Morning, Midnight (Penguin Modern Classics) 4.4 out of 5 stars (7)
£5.49
Voyage in the Dark (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Voyage in the Dark (Penguin Modern Classics) 3.5 out of 5 stars (2)
£6.24
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Penguin Modern Classics)
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After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (Penguin Modern Classics) 4.0 out of 5 stars (2)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Forget Me Knots, 13 Nov 2002
By Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Quartet was Jean Rhys' first novel. It is the story of Marya, a British expatriate living in Paris in the early part of the 20th century. She is acutely self-conscious and yet utterly incapable of changing her life to achieve happiness. Her life revolves around two men: Stephan, her vague Polish husband and HJ, a married British ex-pat who is extremely social and active in the arts. Marya's life has been pared down to essentials: dining, drinking, reading and waiting for her husband to return. When she finds Stephan has been unexpectedly arrested her attachment to him is disturbed. Craving affection and financial security, she desperately attempts to discover why Stephan has been arrested and how she can stay in contact with him. However, she quickly takes up with HJ and his wife, Lois. Her emotions become dangerously tangled between the two. Meandering through defeat after defeat entirely unsatisfied and pining for the money to pay for her rent and a glass of brandy, she ultimately has to face the consequences of her love affair. Marya is vaguely dissatisfied and compulsively tragic. In her life which closely parallels Rhys' own, she finds no remission for the terribly existential fact of life.

In this novel Rhys subtly satirizes her affair with Ford Madox Ford and the life she led with him in Paris. This time of great artistic innovation is reduced to the bare facts of the debased livelihood of the expatriates: their drinking and intertwining sexual affairs. Rhys is unremittingly spare in her emotional honesty. Her prose are hollowed out just as the main character's personality is hollowed out. There is nothing tender about this fictitious recreating. It is brutal, just as Rhys' vision of life. Emotions seep out in sporadic bursts and the rest is contemptuously smoking a cigarette and watching passers by. But the gaze of Marya's is incredibly telling. Her feelings are projected outward onto the people surrounding her. A man or woman witnessed walking by or sitting on the opposite side of a café will inhabit the emotions Marya does not allow to pool inside her. In this way, Rhys fiction is a strong precursor to Alain Robbe-Grillet's because of the intensely violent subjectivity of the character's perception of the world. The solemn nature of novel evokes powerful feelings of sympathy and sorrow.

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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A most excellent novel..., 6 Jun 2001
A 20's modernist novel which could be set in our days. Couldn't put it down until I read all of it. A book which contains powerful characters and a (quite) surprising ending. I recommend it to readers who like psychological insight into post WWI attitudes.
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