Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.
The End of Cheri by Colette- 1929 introduced by Judith Thurman and translated by Paul Eprile - 2022 - A Paris in July 2024 Novel
If Paris is the city of love, then Colette (Sidione-Gabreelle Colette 1873 to 1954) is the high priestess. For many their image of Paris derives from memories of the movie, Gigi, made from her probably most famous work. Living to almost eighty, she produced eighty volumes of writings of all sorts. When she passed in 1954 she was given the first ever state funeral for a French woman. She is an LGTGQ icon and she loved cats.
Early in the month I posted on Chéri, The End of Cheri is the sequel.
The End of Cheri takes place ten years after Cheri. Both Paris and Cheri have been very impacted by World War One. He is married now. He has been out of touch with Lea.
"Most of Colette’s sequels (the Claudine franchise and others) were inferior in power and artistry to their originals. The End of Chéri is an exception: a bleak and ambitious social history disguised as the debacle of an antihero. The men in Colette’s work tend to be shallow, yet however terribly they behave, she pities them as the weaker sex. “Feminine delicacy in literature,” she wrote to a friend, is “one of those clichés that make me furious. Except for three or four female writers, their [women’s] vulgarity, their sentimental brutality, has all that it takes to make any man whatsoever feel wounded and embarrassed.” That is Chéri’s predicament as the hostage of a gynocracy. A decade has passed since he parted from Léa, and through his eyes, Colette captures the sea change in manners, the shift in sex roles, the breakdown of hierarchies, the speeding up of time, and the alternating currents of greed, euphoria, and despair that defined postwar Paris. He has returned from the front as one of those casualties whose fatal wounds are invisible. The meek sylph whom he married, a rich cocotte’s daughter, now manages their household and fortune with an immodest competence that disgusts him. Despite Edmée’s beauty, which he admires (“It’s not fair.”), their conjugal relations are fraternal. She tolerates his disdain partly because her affections are engaged elsewhere —with the maimed soldiers in the hospital she has endowed and the doctor who runs it. “What would you like Chéri to do in life?” Colette asked a journalist. “He wasn’t going to become an industrialist!” The gigolos and kept women of her fiction belong to an ancient nobility whose code of honor is vested in hedonism, and the subtlest among them practice it as an art. But Cheri’s muse has deserted him. He can’t find relief from his sensual and moral shell shock in any of his old vices, including malice." From the introduction by Judith Thurman
I highly recommend Secrets of the Flesh: A Biography of Colette by Judith Thurman
Mel Ulm
The Reading Life
Thanks for presenting this one as well. Definitely needed after the first one, to have the full picture
ReplyDeleteI've yet to read any Colette--this sounds like it shouldn't be the first, but does sound good. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteWhere would we be now, without these women writers who dared to challenge conventions (like the dreaded female delicacy) in their day (now, in our day, as we read them still).
ReplyDelete