Discovering – or rediscovering – writers is one of life’s great pleasures and I am grateful to the novelist Michèle Roberts in her lively and engaged new book on the French writer Colette in OUP’s “My Reading” series (where authors are encouraged to get personal about their literary heroines/heroes) for waking up my interest in Colette (1873-1954). I had read very little Colette, partly because the book I began with, Chéri, I found a little mannered and irritating but I see I was wrong and having just finished My Mother’s House [La Maison de Claudine (1922)] I am now completely hooked. This is a wonderful book of vignettes drawing on Colette’s childhood in rural France.
Looking up a detail on something in the book I found myself at the Radio France website where they say of her: Colette… n’a pas son pareil pour évoquer les petites existences en quelques lines, pour les rendre légendaires en deux ou trois mots, si bien qu’elles acquièrent quelque chose de sublime, la grandeur du mythe. [“Colette…has no equal in evoking small lives, in making them seem legendary in one or two words, in such a way that they acquire a kind of sublimity, the grandeur of myth.”]. That puts her appeal in a nutshell and the pictures of family life, the local landscape, the features of her mother’s house, the domestic pets, the characters and the incidents, are shown with economy and vividness and – something that Michèle responds to so brilliantly in her book – a sensual immediacy and richness. Smells, tastes, sights, colours, sounds are in Colette’s writing always alive.
This short and lively book by Michèle Roberts is bound to win more converts to Colette and in it she weaves in personal stories of her own life with Colette’s very successfully. She examines critically some of the translations as well as conveying the essence of the books she selects to write about and it’s a perfect introduction for anyone who like me needed to brush up their Colette.
PS Please don't forget about the idea of publishing your wonderful talk on the importance of poetry, either here or in print. It was such a great start to the festival, and I'd love to read and reflect upon it.
What a lovely edition of My Mother's House! I'm the opposite of you ... as a teenager I quite liked Cheri, partly thanks to a TV serialisation with a broodingly handsome actor in the title role, but I couldn't get on with the other books at all. I may have been put off by my friends who were studying La Maison de Claudine for A level French and not enjoying it. I must give them another go and see how they come across to my adult self.