|
Claudine's House
Colette
Translated by Andrew Brown
#UB1722
Paperback, 166 pages; 2006 (1922)
$14.95
 Members' Price: $12.70
A family tragedy in a big city evolves discreetly, and its heroes can clash without creating much of a stir. But a village lives all year round in a state of uneventful peace and quiet, and has to satisfy its hunger with meagre titbits of gossip about poaching or flirtations——such a village is pitiless, and nobody kindly and discreetly averts their gaze as a woman goes by who has been robbed of her child in less than a day because of difficulties over money.
The French novelist known simply as Colette may well be more famous for the outrageous life she led than the books she left behind. (We Americans know her best for the movie made of her novel Gigi.) Her memoir Claudine's House relates episodes from her childhood in charming, sometimes bittersweet anecdotes. They're simply told, as though an aged aunt were offering the reader memories from long ago and far away. An array of intriguing characters peoples these fascinating stories--Colette's mother the most memorable among them. The details are so vivid that the reader gets a palpable sense of life in late nineteenth-century France. Surprising--and perhaps telling--is the title of the memoir, since no one named Claudine appears in it: Colette's first husband forced her to write salacious stories about a teenaged girl named Claudine, and then published the series under his own name as author!
(EE)
|
