Showing posts with label Colette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colette. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Foreign fields / Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation

Georges Simenon


Foreign fields: Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation

4 July 2020

If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Proust my bank account would hardly grow by a single penny. Duty, guilt and pride never made the pages turn more swiftly, whatever a book’s length. Almost all vows to catch up on doorstopper classics from the global canon will have failed to outlast the fallen blossoms. Yet you might more realistically blend discovery and delight by exploring some of the smaller miracles of great fiction in translation.

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Monday, March 15, 2010

My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson


Colette


My hero: 

Colette 

by Helen Simpson

'When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure'

Helen Simpson
Saturday 15 May 2010

T

he great French writer Colette has nearly 80 volumes of fiction, journalism and memoirs to her name. When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure which a procession of Victorian heroines had gone a fair way to extinguish. Self-abnegation played no part in Colette's world, fictional or otherwise. Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental, dwelling on "Ces plaisirs qu'on nomme, à la légère, physiques." Inspiringly resourceful, she broke free from an exploitative husband after the early succès fou of her Claudine novels to work the music-halls, playing a half-naked faun and an Egyptian mummy in a jewelled bra. She married three times, yet she never put the needs of others before her own and she never stopped making money from her writing. Far from worrying about the children, when she had a baby at 40 by her second husband (exactly nine months from the day her own mother had died), she planted her in Brittany with a strict English nanny and only visited every few months or so. At 47 she started an affair with her 16-year-old stepson which was to last almost five years.

While not exactly a role model, at least she showed there were other ways of doing it. Hard-headed and hard-working, she was low on pity for herself and others. Her letters are full of descriptions of meals; at 50, weighing an unapologetic 13 stone, she still looked good in a swimsuit. Her novels were admired by Proust and Gide. The third marriage was her happiest, and she was at her most productive in her 50s and 60s. Immobilised by arthritis in her final years, she continued to write from the daybed she called her "raft" up at a window in the Palais-Royal (her last word was "Regarde!"). Nor did she die horribly, or suffer vile punishment; she lived to be over 80 and was the first woman in France to be accorded a state funeral. Her prose is very beautiful and subtle, and I feel more alive when I read her.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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Saturday, January 31, 2009

Digested classics / Claudine in Paris by Colette


DIGESTED CLASSICS
Claudine in Paris by Colette

John Crace
Sat 31 Jan 2009

Page one and I am already exhausted! But I can just about raise my head to look at myself in the mirror. How my hair has been shorn! I may be 17, but I do declare I could pass for 15. Still your beating hearts, mes petits schoolgirl fantasists! For the honour of my notebooks, I shall have to explain how I come to be in Paris. Oh Papa, I am as furious with you as I am with my naughty eyebrows! How could you have forced us to leave Montigny after a publisher failed to respond to the delivery of your manuscript on the Malacology of Fresnois within half an hour? It was all I could do to find my darling cat, Fanchette, before our train departed.
Our arrival at the apartment in the dismal rue Jacob is confused in a fog of misery. The effort of unpacking a single box of clothes left me with a brain fever so profound the doctors feared I might never try on another pair of camiknickers again. The violets by my bedside prolonged my illness for they reminded me of Montigny and it was several months before I was well enough to venture outside.


"We should visit my sister, your Aunt Coeur," Papa said one day.
"But my hair is far too short!" I complained. "And I have nothing to wear!"
The whipped-cream living room couldn't have been more 1900 and I was curious to get to know my aunt's grandson, Marcel, who was waiting there. The days before our dinner engagement passed slowly. I spent my mornings having my bottom pinched - Ooh la la! - and the afternoons worrying that my breasts were too tiny for my décolletage - encore Ooh la la!
It was annoying to be seen in public with Marcel as he was far too pretty to be a boy and everyone stared at him not me. Yet I contained my jealousy and fluttered my eyelashes coquettishly at him.
"I am not a goody-goody," he said, "but I will not make love to you. Rather, let me tell you about my dear friend, Charlie."
How thrillingly racy for the Paris demi-monde! A boy's forbidden love for another boy! We must become each other's confidante!
"Tell me all about Charlie's naughty bits," I demanded.
"Only if you tell me all about your Fresnois Sapphism," he pouted.
How I yearned for a glimpse of Aimée's budding breasts! How I used to delight in beating Luce about the head when I caught sight of her staring at me pulling my silken stockings over my milky thighs! How strange it was she had not replied to my letter! But, no! I would make Marcel wait awhile.

Colette

After a few days' tiring shopping, Marcel introduced me to his father, my Uncle Renaud. Mon oncle bowed low before me, taking my hands in his and kissed them softly, brushing his silver moustache against my quivering skin. My lips flushed with excitement. How could I contain my incestuous feelings for an older man?
"Let me take you to the opera," he whispered in my ear, "and thrill you with scandalous tales of men who dress as women while we watch Marcel and Charlie slip away in the night together."
Paris was muggy that month and men were staring at the sweat glistening on my exposed breasts when I unexpectedly met Luce, dressed in the most expensive fashions, on the Rive Gauche.
"Ma chère Claudine," she said. "I moved to Paris to escape my horrid papa and threw myself on the mercies of my wealthy 127-year-old uncle, who gives me 30 louis each month for the pleasure of my flesh! But I yearn for you. My breasts are rounder now; take them in your greedy hands and ravish them."
She pushed her mouth towards mine and I felt a momentary passionate quiver, before beating her cruelly until she gasped her little death. I dismissed her contemptuously, enjoying her squirming every bit as uncomfortably as the messieurs who are reading this on the Métro.
"So tell me about all the saucy things that you and Charlie do?" I begged Marcel, as he tried on a crepe-de-chine cravat.
"It is a special love we have," he replied, guilefully. "Not like Papa. He is a journalist and he sleeps with any older woman whose nipples harden for him."
How I hated those other women! And how my own nipples also strangely hardened!
"Do not call me oncle any more," Oncle implored, as we shared a bottle of Asti Spumante. "It makes me feel such a dirty old man."
"That is precisely why I love to use it," I said, feeling quite gay. "I would be your daughter, if I could, as that is so much more shocking. Yet if you insist, I will call you Renaud."
"Oh, Claudine! My grey hair is turning blond once more. Let us be wed!"
How I enjoyed the twisted thrill of older men imagining themselves in bed with a submissive teenaged girl! And yet how strangely coy and dated it now seemed!
"You're only getting married to Papa to get his money," Marcel sulked.
"I cannot marry you," I cried, thrusting myself against Renaud in a last attempt at titillation. "I will be your mistress instead."
"Non," Renaud insisted. "I may be a dirty old perve, but I am a dirty old perve with family values."


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