Colette (1873–1954)

Colette does what she does best; she writes about love, but for her this was always synonymous with entrapment and this theme is fully explored in this wonderful novel.

It was published in 1911 and Colette wrote most of it while she was on the road with a dance and mime act. She wrote it backstage, on trains and in hotel rooms and the immediacy of the writing comes through by her use of the first person in her narrative. We feel the cold backstage dressing rooms, the cramped and poorly lit show more hotel rooms, the struggle for survival with her fellow artists, their wary camaraderie and battles with ill health. Colette like her heroine (Rennee) was obsessive about her backstage dressing room preparations which were interrupted by admirers and would be lovers.

The vagabonde is Renee who has recently extricated herself from a tyrannical husband Adolphe Taillandy and has sought to earn her living on the stage while writing a novel when she can. Collete at this time had just left her husband Willy Gauthier-Villars and Taillandy is obviously based on him:

As far as I am concerned, the only genius he had was for lying. No woman, none of his women, could possibly have appraised and admired, feared and cursed his passion for lying as much as I did. Adolphe Taillandy used to lie feverishly, voluptuously, untiringly, almost involuntary. For him adultery was merely a type of falsehood, and by no means the most delectable.

Rennee in the novel attracts the attention of a rich admirer and when he comes backstage she treats him with disdain, his persistence pays off and she eventually thinks that she might be in love with her 'Big Noodle'. He offers her a life of ease and luxury, but she hesitates unwilling to give up her hard won independent life.

Colette writes beautifully breathing fire and passion into a story of love ,loss and fear of the future, without any trace of a cool Freudian analytical approach. She tells her would be lover;

I refuse to see the most beautiful countries of the world microscopically reflected in the amorous mirror of your eyes

Renee goes on tour with her mime and dance group and the novels climax is written as a series of letters exchanged between Renee and her 'Big Noodle' who stays behind in Paris. Colette writes some beautiful love letters which point subtly to the denouement of her novel. Fine writing indeed:

To speak the truth is one thing, but the whole truth that cannot , must not be said

I thoroughly enjoyed this marvellous book show less

Claudine’s House by French novelist Colette is actually a collection of semi-biographical essays that explore her childhood in rural France. These are simple stories, written beautifully that hearken back to a different time and place capturing her past, her love of nature, and her relationships with various pets and family members.

Originally published in 1922 I found this an immersive read filled with poetic images of the lush French countryside. When she turns to her memories of family, show more in particular her mother, we can feel the bonds of love that existed. Although it doesn’t follow a strict timeline, we are given glimpses of her life as a child, a teenager and then as an adult with her own children. The author writes with verve, at times adding humor and at others a dark melancholy.

Claudine’s House is a gentle read that reminds one of the small pleasures that life can offer. show less

Phil’s parents and Vinca’s parents have spent the summer together in the same villa on the Brittany coast since time immemorial, and Phil and Vinca have been best friends throughout their childhood. But now they are adolescents, and their relationship has started to get a bit more complicated. All the more so after Phil is initiated sexually by Camille Dalleray, a stranger who has taken a villa a little further along the coast and is very obviously turned on by his casually exposed show more suntanned flesh.

As you would expect, it’s all in what looks to us like the best possible taste but was moderately shocking coming from a woman writer in the 1920s, with lots of fecund Breton coastal scenery and lashings of lightly-encoded awakening teenage sexuality. Something like a Famous Five novel as imagined by D H Lawrence, perhaps.

I was intrigued by the way Colette superficially follows the plot conventions of classic French fiction by having the young hero pulled into a liaison by an older woman who subsequently renounces him for his own good, but she undermines this (and maybe throws a retrospective question-mark over the heros of Balzac, Stendhal and the rest) by emphasising Mme Dalleray’s “masculine” looks and ways of behaving, and even her non-gendered first name Camille. Are we supposed to think that, but for the requirements of literary propriety, it would have been a man who chatted up Phil and invited him in for an Orangina? show less

The lengthy final section of this novella decided it for me. I had been asking myself if this were a good book or sentimental kitsch. Of course, sentimental kitsch might be your idea of good book, but tastes differ.
The first third of the narrative had been told largely from the point of view of Léa, an aging courtesan who has permitted herself the luxury of a boy toy, her “Chéri,” who just happens to be the indolent, insolent son of her best frenemy. She oscillates between intoxication show more at his physical beauty and irritation over his bothersome personality. This ends when he announces he will soon marry. They agree to end their five-year affair.
Léa leaves town and disappears from the narrative. The middle section switches to Fred’s point of view. That is Chéri’s given name, which Léa never uses. He soon feel trapped in his marriage. His bride is rich, young, beautiful, and vapid. After the challenge of jousting with his “Nounoune,” as he calls Léa, he becomes restless and disappears for three months. The narrative follows him in his dissipation. He stays out to all hours, drinks too much, dabbles in drugs — does everything, in fact, except the one thing his wife and mother both assume he has done: have one last romance before settling down to married life.
Toward the end of his binge, he haunts Léa’s home. When a light in the window shows that she has returned to Paris, the stage is set for the dénouement. Léa has become philosophical, accepting that she will now live the life of an old woman (she is just turned 50; a century ago, that was old, especially for one who has lived on her beauty). She has retired for the night, but at midnight Chéri appears at her door. The remainder of the book is one final jousting tournament between these two who are obsessed with the other.
The author animates both characters here, but explores more deeply the ever-shifting feelings and perceptions of Léa. They make love. Here is where I began to fear the worst, since prose about love-making is often embarrassingly bad. Colette pulls it off, though, which saved the book for me. Her handling of the morning after, in particular, impressed me.
I selected this book as a way to brush up my French. It wasn’t too thick, so I thought it wouldn’t take me as long as it does to read Flaubert. I have a good grasp of basic French vocabulary — the most common four-to-five thousand words — but in reading this, there was hardly a page on which I didn’t have to look up at least four words. When this happens, it’s often a sign that the author has gone all pretentious and abstract (I’m looking at you, Sartre), but in this case, it’s because Colette chooses very concrete, specific vocabulary. The names of trees, flowers, articles of clothing, and body parts abound. The result is languid and sensuous, much like the two characters.
My final impression is that this book is all the more an impressive achievement because of what it risked. Instead of being a sentimental tear-jerker, it is a sensitive exploration of what a less-complicated age liked to call the war of the sexes. show less