I Used to Live Here Once

The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

De: Miranda Seymour

Narrado por: Diana Quick

An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now.

In I Used to Live Here Once, Miranda Seymour sheds new light on the artist whose proud and fiercely solitary life profoundly informed her writing. Rhys experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil, all of which contributed to the "Rhys woman" of her oeuvre. Today, listeners still intuitively relate to her unforgettable characters, vulnerable, watchful, and often alarmingly disaster-prone outsiders; women with a different way of moving through the world. And yet, while her works often contain autobiographical material, Rhys herself was never a victim. The figure who emerges for Seymour is cultured, self-mocking, unpredictable-and shockingly contemporary.

©2022 Miranda Seymour (P)2022 Tantor

The Brilliant life of Jean Rhys

Miranda Seymour captures Jean Rhys's complex personality, her volatile relationship with men, her struggle as an immigrant and writer like no one else. She does an admirable job in separating the person from the writer, a problem most people have when they read Rhys. Actor Diana Quick's narration is exciting, finely nuanced and riveting. Rhys is not an easy subject to write about, but Seymour makes readers feel like they are int he same room with Rhys.

Awful narration

OMG....this is the worst book and even worse narration I have ever heard, and I am a serious reader.
So bad in fact I couldn't even finish this book.
I'll admit that narration killed it for me, but possibly reading an actual book may have been a different experience. I guess I'll never know because I have no desire to ever read this book again, even tough I found it on the list of "must read in a lifetime."
I'm not sure who thought that this particular narrator was a good idea for this book, because I don't even know where to begin describing my listening experience.
The narrator has no concept of comma, period, intonation, or volume AT ALL!
She's reading it as one quiet and very looong mysterious run on sentence. Her accent and the way she pronounces her "Rs" makes it even worse. Not sure if it's some type of speech impediment, dental issue, or something else, but in any case, she has no business narrating books, especially not the kind of a more complex nature such as this one that requires concentration and focus.
I can't really reccomend this one....not in the audible format that is.