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."