Tigers Are Better-Looking, Jean Rhys

The title of this book is so appealing that raises expectations and entices us to read it, especially if its author is the well known Jean Rhys - whose main work is the novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" - a writer of Caribbean roots, with half Creole blood and half English blood. His life story is linked to British colonialism in the nineteenth century, when Dominica, his country of birth, was still a British colony. With a Welsh for father and a Dominican mother, Rhys struggled to find her place in life against the discrimination encountered by those who are neither from here nor from there, a fact which is reflected acutely in the eight stories in this volume.

The first thing that strikes us in reading these stories is the ill-fated lives of the protagonists, almost all of them women, who are torn between the optimism of their youthful energies and the everyday tangible evidence of failure, which, being permanent, changes optimism into pessimism. Those who know the life of the author will see that all these stories, some more some less, describe episodes of her early life in native lands and then as a young girl in the land of the English colonizers, to where she emigrated. In fact Rhys lived in the British Antilles until about sixteen, traveling then to Europe where she tried to assimilate into London life without much success. Most of the stories revolve around her wretched experiences of this period.

Background to all accounts is the acute sense of social rejection Rhys suffered as a result of the ruthless contempt exercised on her by the fully bred English gent who used to brand her "a horrid creature of the colonies." This discriminatory treatment unleashes in the author a violent aversion to all things English, embodied in the city of London, which is tangible in the texts: "It was Eddie who first contaminated me with doubts about "the homeland", that is, England. He was always very quiet when others who had never seen it sang its praises and spoke with grand gesticulations of London." And then: "Don’t come to me with stories about London. There are many people in London with the heart like a stone." And even more categorical: "London always smells the same. It sucks, you think, but I'm glad to be back. And for a while you cheer up. Anything can happen just around the corner, you think. But long before you reach the corner you are already discouraged."

The most accomplished stories are also the most representative of the spirit of frustration that crosses all the work and that is embodied in the deceptions of characters that inhabit the fringes of society and life. These stories are "Let Them Call It Jazz" and "Outside the Machine."

In the first one we attend to the dramatic downfall of an immigrant from the colonies who comes to London in search of her fortune, being instead abused by destiny from the moment she is expelled from the guest house where she first took residence until the moment she is sent to spend a stint in jail, both as consequences of the discriminatory treatment people with stone hearts bestow her. The explanation she gives herself for so much misfortune comes from blaming her poverty: "I'm a nuisance because I have no money, and that's all, I think." And yet, against better judgment, she presents a strong defense of her conscience by means of sheathing her difficult predicament with a stubborn optimism: "When they noisily close the door behind me, I think: they lock me up, but what they do is leave out all those pesky devils. Now they cannot reach me." And then she concludes returning to the money issue but reserving the last word for her: "I fit nowhere, and I have no money to buy the right to fit somewhere. Neither do I want to."

Rhys, not content with bringing down one of its anti-heroines to jail, in "Outside the Machine" she places another as an inmate in an English sanatorium, located in French territory, because of an illness that is not revealed. The treatment she gets from both the medical staff and the other inmates is cold and dismissive, giving her the feeling of not belonging, of being out of something. From there she speculates that human society can be likened to a machine whose relentless advance leaves stranded on the road, without feeling any remorse, all those who it deems are not part of the machinery: "She was very quiet, so nobody would know that she was afraid. Because she was outside the machine, there could happen, at any time, their coming with huge iron tongs to pick her up and throw her out, leaving her to rot." However, it seems there is life even out of the machine, because after recovering, when ready to face again the abyss of despair the world presented her, a truly human heart saves her from falling into it and heartens her to live a little longer.

Against all odds, the characters in these stories manage to keep a certain serenity in face of fatality, a moral attitude whose philosophical basis can be glimpsed in the following quote: "Then she relaxed her body and let it just lay there, thinking of nothing, because there is peace in despair just as there is despair in peace."

Regarding the story that gives the book its title, it is good-reading, but others are more so.