ColetteReviews

I only read Cheri. It is the story of a woman and her younger paramour. She is approaching middle age and must relinquish her lover to his marriage. It is likely the last such relationship she will have, given her age. Separation is very painful for each of them. This is a very rich depiction of middle-age desire and its complications. I will probably return to the End of Cheri at a later date.

got this at pelican books in anacortes, began and finished on my flight

some beautiful ideas and i appreciate colettes honesty

This is an Editions J'ai lu pocket book, remarkably similar to Livres de Poche. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27ai_lu

3.5 for Cheri & 3 for Last of Cheri.

No shame in Decadence.

The next book on my shelf was Cheri and the last of Cheri which was translated from the French by Roger Senhouse in 1951. The two novelettes were originally published in 1920 and 1926 respectively by Colette. It is a simple story of a decadent lifestyle set either side of the first world war: a war that hardly intrudes on the lives of Cheri (real name Fred) and his lover Léa.

Cheri is16 years old when he is seduced by his mother's best friend Léa who is an ex courtesan; 43 years old and now wealthy in her own write. Cheri also is very rich and spends his days in luxurious living spending his money on motorcars, but keeping careful note of the money that he spends on his servants. We pick up the story six years later when Cheri's mother has found him a marriage partner. Edmée is a quiet sixteen year old girl from a wealthy family and Cheri is drifting towards his upcoming marriage. The story starts with a truculent Cheri just gotten out of Léa's bed and wanting to play with her pearls. They both realise that their relationship is coming to an end. Léa and Cheri are both obsessive about how they look, Cheri is described as a beautiful handsome youth and Léa is fighting a battle with her age. The weather in Paris is hot and their languorous lifestyle is brilliantly captured by Colette, the couple hardly ever seem to leave Léa's boudoir: their mornings are spent arguing, then kissing and making up. There are flashbacks of their six years together: a stay in Normandy when Léa tries to interest Cheri in boxing under the tutelage of Patron, and Cheri develops a body to go with his good looks. Cheri and Edmée are married, but after three months Cheri is still thinking about Léa and leaves home.

The last of Cheri picks up his story when he is 30 years old. He has fought in the war and is now back with Edmée, who has become a business woman and manager of a hospital. Cheri is still drifting through life, still thinking about Léa who has gone abroad, but is rumoured to be coming back to Paris. He is drifting inevitably to his own destruction, losing his good looks and not taking care of his health.

Colette captures the decadent lifestyle of a small circle of rich people living in luxury not far from the Bois de Boulogne. They seem unaffected by world events although the women are keenly interested in making money. Cheri survives in this hot-house lifestyle through his good looks and wealth, but his relationship with Léa has meant that while he has become skilled as a lover he has hardly grown up as a man. The champagne flows and the luxurious breakfasts and lunches keep on coming. Cheri says of his bride to be Edmée

Let her kiss the sacred ground that I tread on and thank her lucky stars for the privilege.

Léa thinks about old age:

She had a foretaste of the sinful pleasures of the old - little else than a concealed aggressiveness, daydreams of murder and the keen recurrent hope for catastrophes that will spare only one living creature and one corner of the globe.

The characters are not particularly nasty, but they are not very nice either and Colette does a good job in providing an interesting, well written, atmospheric story that holds the interest. Cheri is little more than a very rich and very spoilt brat, but we continue to follow his progress through a life that appears to be sliding away. The Last of Cheri is best read while suffering from eating or drinking too much, but don't leave it till the morning after. 4 stars.

Fun to read Gigi after seeing the movie. The grooming of the young Gigi for her life as a courtesan is a bit more heartless here than in the singing version, and it does make you wonder why this play is performed in so many high schools....
The cat is a strange story of a self-absorbed man who loves his cat over anyone else, in a distinctly unhealthy manner. Wonderful but it does give you the feeling you need to wash your hands afterwards.

Fun fun fun and ever so slightly shocking for the time. If you've never read Colette, you really must. These are delightfully wicked stories, subversive in the best ways.

Actual title: Renee, la vagabonde

I don’t discount the themes of Chéri and it’s sequel, the End of Chéri. They’re present and interesting: the role of women in post-war France as it interplays with the waywardness of young men sent to war during their formative years only to return to an interwar society that seems to not need them anymore.

Indeed, Chéri’s story is something worth probing on. He’s the plaything of a much older woman in a way that stunts his maturity and leaves him vapid and self obsessed. The constant talk of his looks by women much his senior fuels his Dorian Gray-esque obsession with beauty.

When he returns from war, it seems everyone has moved on from the vapid obsession with beauty to the vapid obsession with money and status. His former lover has grown old and out of shape and worst of all to Chéri she’s happy and unbothered by her transformation.

All of that is interesting, but it doesn’t really come together until the final fourth of the book(s). Before then it’s a slog through Parisian bourgeois predilections. It may be the translation but the writing was overly clunky. Colette is moving far too quickly through dialogue and internal monologues in a way that doesn’t lend itself to story or themes. It didn’t leave me with a feeling of free flowing consciousness moving between thoughts and words, instead I was left lost and struggling to connect with what was written on the page.

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I think this was the wrong book for me at this time. However, it would never be a favorite as I found the pace too slow. Colette gives beautifully written descriptions so I can understand why some would appreciate her writing more than I did.

As for the plot, I could relate to Léa (as I am also a woman of a certain age) but Chéri struck me as a lout and so I couldn't really understand his appeal.

At first beautiful language, then boring, repetitive, no story to be honest.

The first novel written by Colette was attributed to her husband Willy when it was first published in 1900. Colette later said that her husband Henri Gauthier-Villars (Willy) had found a draft of her first novel and suggested how his wife could improve it, in order to get it published. There is no doubt that "Willy" a notable figure in the literary world would have been able to find a way of publishing the novel, which he did under his own name. The question which remains unanswered is how much input he had in the final text. The novel is largely autobiographical and tells the story of 15 year old Claudine's final year at school. It could only have been written by someone who had experienced that final year and is written in the first person. It reveals the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl eager to launch into a lesbian relationship with a nineteen year old woman and her frustration when the object of her affections is stolen from her by the head teacher. Claudine however is in control of her situation she is learning about life while still involved in all the frivolities of a fifteen year old schoolgirl. This is related with such candour and such pride that the reader feels it could only have been written by Colette.

The book today reads as a light and frothy entertainment with an underlying knowingness of the sexual mores of the time. Claudine is fortunate in going to a village school where the majority of the girls are farmer's daughters. She is intelligent and has a talent for singing, drawing and french composition and her father is a naturalist/scientist certainly belonging to the middle class, therefore Claudine is able to dominate her fellow students and to hold her own with the teachers. Claudine loves the scratchy working village which is surrounded by glorious countryside. She is left very much to her own devices by her father as there is no mother figure in evidence. Apart from arithmetic and problem solving Claudine finds the schoolwork a breeze, especially as she is plundering her fathers library at home; educating herself.

We meet Claudine roaming through the countryside on her way to school and follow her through her lessons. The headmistress has hired a new teacher and a teaching assistant and Colette describes them:

"As for Mademoiselle Sergent, she seemed anything but kindly and I augured ill of that redhead. She has a good figure, with well rounded bust and hips, but she is flagrantly ugly. Her face is puffy and permanently crimson and her nose is slightly snub between two small black eyes deep-set and suspicious......... her assistant the pretty Aimée Lanthenay attracts me as much as her superior repels me......... "Little Mademoiselle Lanthenay, your supple body seeks and demands an unknown satisfaction. If you were not an assistant Mistress at Montigny you might be - I'd rather not say"

Claudine attempts to seduce Aimée, but is eventually rejected when Aimée enters a lesbian relationship with Mademoiselle Sergent. There are two new male teachers hired for the boys school next door, who attract the attention of the elder girls. There are two big events in the book one of which is the 15 year olds matriculation examinations which take place in a town a couple of hours train journey away and Claudine and her close group of friends must endure two days of being examined. This is a fascinating episode that homes in on the trials and tribulations of this two day event. The nervousness of the girls, the characters of the examiners, who stage a one day oral examination and the worry of the teachers who do what they can to help their pupils are all brought to our attention through the eyes of Claudine. The other event is the welcoming committee back in Montigny for a Deputy of the French Senate when the whole village is "en fête" and Claudine has a starring role as a singer and speechmaker at the village school.

The competition between the girls in Claudine's class is intense, tricks are played, physical intimidation is rife and Claudine is master of it all. They try to outdo each other in making themselves attractive and/or seductive. Every new item of clothing, every look, every nuance towards elder girls or men is dissected in the mind of Claudine. She follows meticulously the exchanges between AImée and Mademoiselle Sergent, spying on them when she can. Colette does a marvellous job of placing the reader inside the head of a precocious fifteen year old girl, but she also informs the readers of the situation of those girls, who are dependent on the goodwill of their teachers, but more dependent on the men who might eventually choose them for marriage. They must also tread a fine line with some local dignitaries who might press them for favours or worse.

Colette portrays school and village life in lively fashion. Through Claudine she is amused, sometimes bored by the petty restrictions, but always passionately involved in the life around her. Claudine's forthright expression of her thoughts and feelings are seductive in themselves and her connection with the village and its natural surrounds are well portrayed. The novel pushed heavily by Wily was a success, even a bit of a sensation. Colette said that he encouraged her to spice up her story and no doubt was able to proof read for her; there were three more novels continuing the story. I read an English translation by Antonia White in a penguin edition - 4 stars.

My absolute favorite by Colette. I reread this collection of stories like eating a box of chocolates.

3.5 stars. This is sort of a collection of essays. Unlike much of Colette's work, it's almost unemotional and detached.

3.5 stars. This is sort of a collection of essays. Unlike much of Colette's work, it's almost unemotional and detached.
I also forgot how very binary she was in her thinking about genders. There is a lot of emphasis on the "incompleteness" of women lovers. It is focused on the queer communities but not flattering.½

Gigi (at fifty pages) is more short story than novel, a remarkably unvarnished account of a (very) young girl's life, views and behaviours, especially when written by a woman in 1940s France. The Cat, on the other hand, published in 1933, is the exceptionally deep account of a man's strange engagement with his cat, as he and the cat move in (and quite rapidly out of) marriage. Colette's early work was published in his own name (and to his considerable profit) by her abusive husband. Her escape and emergence as a writer of such innovative work is cause for celebration.

A suitable tonic after several YA-friendly tales of childhood and growing up. Colette was much more interested in representing life as it really is, with bullying, flirting, lesbian relationships, and everything else you might imagine.

I already put stuff about Gigi and Julie de Carneilhan; i don't know what happened to it. The third story, "Chance Aquaintances, was the most enjoyable of the three. Colette is set to go sublet a crappy chateau close to some French watering hole. When she finds out how crappy it is, she goes to stay in a hotel, where her Chance Aquaintances, a couple, are her neighbors across the balcony. The husband is a real pendejo, and I thoroughly enjoyed Colette's treatment of him, as such.

Colette is both not a feminist—she wants her feminine mystique, and very carefully avoids any expansion beyond it, almost to the point of rudeness—and a very defensive/reactive woman who thinks that tom cats aren’t as cool as she-cats, etc etc: it’s all a little tiresome and absurd to someone who thinks like a thinker, honestly. She has the odd moment of interest, like when she wonders if frivolity can create a sort of ersatz courage (not her exact words), and she isn’t usually the rosy sort of liar, despite her drinking the glass to its dregs, so…. Well, in a sense I don’t know the value in a way of this book.

In a way, because she is still a French woman—Austen does not write in the same way, and I didn’t like Austen upon first exposure (to simplify a rather complex relationship), and I have less exposure to the French than to the British—and a woman of another time, when being a woman and trying to decide whether to play by the rules or not—indeed, deciding *whether* to make a consistent decision to conform or rebel—was not easy, and in quite the same way I was never presented with that same choice, so…. Well, in a sense I don’t know if I can judge in a way this book.

…. After-word: Of course, now I don’t think that thinking in the think-y style is the only way to live, although because Collette is so insular femme-mystique and thinks that France and Germany are countries of the race of Men, tribes of the Man-Nation, and women belong to the mysterious race of Women, which has no important dealings with Man-Tribes, you know, since only a real-woman knows what good fun frills are, and men go to war because they’re men and because they have no important business in Woman-Nation, you know.

So, because of that, I don’t think I’ll read it again…. But yes, sometimes when you read writers who are women, and French, perhaps, and women of decades gone by, you do get less of the think-think style of thinking, than you would even with a male comic, or even English Jane, you know. And maybe //some// of those books //are// worth reading, even if this was a little exaggerated…. You know, like…. I can’t just buy a home decorating guide or go to a store for that, I’ve really got to do those things while being a //real woman//, you know.

Doctor Who: Am I really that much of a brute?

Well, maybe Doctor Who is, but….

[This review is only for Chéri.]

Plot:
Léa has lived a full life as the lover of various rich men. Now that she has grown older herself, she has instead taken a young lover herself, Chéri. Chéri is the son of her friend Charlotte and almost 25 years younger than her. He is a petulant, aimless but beautiful man and Léa never expected to be with him for as long as they have. When he tells her that he will get married soon, Léa is surprised at how hard the news hits her. And Chéri, too, finds that life without Léa isn't quite what he expected.

Chéri is a beautiful written, insightful character study that I very much enjoyed to read. I am definitely looking forward to reading its sequel.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2021/11/05/cheri-colette/½

I picked it up because I had recently gone through a Maurice Chevalier phase and had remembered Gigi. While the movie never really lives up to my memory of it (and Leslie Caron, charming as she was, is overshadowed by the costumes and the fact the Audrey Hepburn would have done better), the little novelette was charming, in spite of the fact that Chevalier's character doesn't exist. I found myself nostalgic for the days when 16-year-olds were considered children. And I loved the ending even though, or perhaps because of the fact that, Gaston's process of thought has to be assumed.

It was delightful from my 1940's standpoint. :)

Note for those wanting to read it: It is almost impossible to find. Try Archive.org.

I think I’m drawn to older lesbian books more so than contemporary because it’s reassurance that there’s always been women who love women so its harder to invalidate. The side effect of this is also positive because lots of these tell stories without making a big deal of it, though they usually end in tragedy. Claudine à l’école didn’t have some sapphique endgame, but didn’t end with invalidating Claudine’s lesbianism at least. It’s a story about deep relationships between women, without saying the word lesbian (or gay or whatever else) once. None of the characters make a big deal of it, and none of the obstacles to her relationship come from a place of homophobia (the biggest obstacle’s literally another woman). This was refreshing compared to the near-trauma porn that people churn out today.

That being said I read this in French and it took a really really long time, and I’m not sure I gained anything reading it in French, because there aren’t any language-specific tricks or anything. The prose is lovely, but I found myself looking forward to it ending really soon after it started. Next time I want to read an aimless story about chaotic girls I will just reread Azumanga Diaoh, which is honestly the closest comparison I can make. Similar to Azumanga though, there were a lot of disturbing references to relationships with (pedophilic) adult men… I don’t want to read about them perving on teenagers unless it casts some sort of critical eye, and I’m not sure if Colette had that given the historical context of this work.

I really did like the protagonist, Claudine, though. She has a bad attitude, and is sort of an asshole. Some people might find her frustrating, but I liked that Colette went to lengths to ensure she has no redeeming qualities, it’s a looooot funnier than the alternative.

I got to read a beautiful old copy of this from my university, it was from 1929, published by Albin Michel, and H. Mirande’s illustrations really improved the book for me. I’m attaching my favorites before I have to return it.

This was probably one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Age; it is the most hauntingly beautiful theme within this novel. From the pearl necklace to the dress--the shade of white, the absence of color symbolizes the idea of youth. This novel certainly wells up emotion as you witness this tragic romance through a jeweled lens.

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 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.