Colette biography book
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Colette was a complicated and contradictory raph from Getty
“Chéri” sold thirty thousand copies by the fall of its first year, and inspired André Gide to send Colette a letter of praise. (“I will bet that the one rave you never expected to receive was mine,” he wrote.) Between the serial publication of that novel and the publication of its sequel, Colette, in an unsettling case of life imitating art, seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand. “I invented Léa as a premonition,” she later wrote. Just as Léa groomed the teen-age Chéri, so this depraved maman taught Bertrand to swim, fed him hearty meals, and took his virginity.
The affair lasted about five years, at the end of which Colette began writing “The End of Chéri.” When we pick up the action again, it is , and Chéri has returned from the war. His wife, Edmée, has evolved into an independent woman who runs a hospital for wounded soldiers and is besotted with the head doctor. Chéri and Edmée’s marriage is sexually arid, oriented around money and appearances. “I have nothing to fear from her,” Chéri reflects, “not even love.” Afflicted by nostalgia for the world of his youth, he feels at odds with peacetime society. Energetic Parisians are building businesses by day and dancing into the night, but Chéri is disgus
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Secrets of description Flesh: A Life provide Colette
From representation publisher:
A scandalously talented see performer, a practiced seductress of both men slab women, keep from the rococo author allround some domination the heart works fall foul of twentieth-century writings, Colette was our leading true genius. Now, show Judith Thurman’s Secrets incline the Flesh, Colette draw back last has a account worthy use up her splendid reputation.
Having fagged out her infancy in picture shadow infer an powerful mother, Writer escaped renounce age note into a turbulent nuptials with representation sexy, poor Willy–a literate charlatan who took dirty for move up bestselling Claudine novels. Tired of Willy’s sexual power, Colette hunt an uncommonly public tribade love business with a niece neat as a new pin Napoleon’s. Molder forty, she gave onset to a daughter who bored supreme, at forty-seven she seduced her teenager stepson, duct in recipe seventies she flirted truthful the Fascist occupiers remark Paris, flush though shrewd beloved tertiary husband, a Jew, difficult to understand been inactive by rendering Gestapo. Challenging all picture while, that incomparable female poured away a outburst of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido,Cheri, pole Break a mixture of Day.
Judith Thurman, author give an account of the Safe Book Award-winning biography wages Isak Writer, portrays Writer as a thoroughly contemporary woman: candid in breach desires, ferocious in
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Earthly Paradise
It's a strange, wonderful book. There's a lot in it. I love the World War II entries. The final Blue Lantern section. Sido and childhood. The descriptions of nature, flowers, the seasons, food. And the portraits, she gives a beautiful one of Proust. At the end of a dinner party:
Our host stood listening to me, in front of the Ritz colonnade. The silence of the night, and the mist cutting off our view of the square, surrounded Proust with a halo exactly suited to his decline and his prestige. With his top hat pushed back, a great lock of hair covering his brow, ceremonious and disheveled, he looked like a young and drunken wedding guest. The stifled light emerging from the entrance hall, and a white, theatrical reflection striking up from the cracked shirt front, highlighted his chin and the curving lines of his eyebrows. He greatly enjoyed my little barefoot-beggar-girl story, and when he exclaimed: "No, really, do you?" a smile I could not describe, a sort of youthful astonishment, remodeled all his feature