The Sunday Salon: Au Revoir, July

And so, Paris in July draws to a close. Karen and Tamara have hosted a month filled with French-themed books, movies, food, art, music, travel and more. My month has focused on French-themed reading - nonfiction, a novel, short stories and essays. There are still two books I won't finish before the end of the month, but would like to mention.

Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands
The book opens with Rowland's own reflection on the city, "I'm a Parisian of the recurrent, revolving-door kind." Her essay is followed by the thoughts and observations of thirty-two other writers who made Paris there own. They write about money, fashion, dating, parenting, food, and more. My initial plan was to read the book cover-to-cover, but I've decided instead to space the essays out over the rest of the summer. This is a book to be savored.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
My current audiobook is proving to be the perfect follow-up to A Moveable Feast, adding further fuel to my Hemingway fixation. It's a fictionalized account of the Heminway's time in Paris, told from Hadley's perspective. I have to keep reminding myself this is fiction. Reading Hemingway's early stories concurrently is enriching the experience.

Preparations are also underway for next summer. Knowing I've been unable to find any of Colette's novels or short stories locally, my daughter brought this treasure home from New York. I wonder if I'll be able wait that long....

I'll close our trip with Ernest Hemingway's final paragraph of A Moveable Feast:

"There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always return to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."

Thank you, again, Karen and Tamara. I've had a wonderful time in Paris this month.

Virago Reading Week: Colette's Birthday

Today marks the birth of another favorite Virago author - Colette.  Last year, I enjoyed Cheri and The Last of Cheri, and plan to read more of her novels following the TBR Dare.  Have you read Colette? Virago publishes one title, The Other Woman.

From today's Writer's Almanac:


It is the birthday of the writer who said, "Be happy. It's one way of being wise." That's Colette, (books by this author) born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, in the Burgundy Region of France (1873). She's the author of more than 70 books of fiction, memoir, and journalism, including the novel Gigi (1944), which has spawned a number of stage and film adaptations.

When she was 20, she married an older man, a writer and music critic who wrote under the pen name "Monsieur Willy." The young Colette wrote under his pen name, too — her husband locked her up in a room until she had produced a satisfactory amount of writing each day. She fled their marriage in her early 30s, danced half naked in music halls around Paris, and once incited a riot during a performance at the Moulin Rouge. She became lovers with several women, including a famous French actress named Marguerite Moreno, whom Colette wrote to one June evening in 1925, a few nights after the summer solstice:
"What am I doing? Heavens, I'm spinning. And I use this verb as a planet would. Yes, I'm spinning.
I've seen roses, honeysuckle, forty degrees Centigrade of dazzling heat, moonlight, ancient wisteria enlacing the door of my old home in Saint-Sauveur.
I've seen the night over Fontainebleau. And as I said, I'm spinning.
Beside me there a is a dark boy at the wheel. I'm on my way back to Paris, but shall I stay there? The dark boy beside me is still at the wheel, and how strange everything is! And how good I am, and how amazed I am, and what wise improvidence in my behaviour! Oh yes, I'm spinning! As you can see, you must not worry about me.
From time to time I am uneasy about myself, and I give a start, prick up my ears, and cry out, But what are you doing? and then I refuse to think any more about it ... Just now, on the telephone, an enlightened Chiwawa, enlightened by the dark, dark, dark boy, sang my praises. The era of frankness is back and the cards are on the table.
But, my Marguerite, how strange it all is! ... I have the fleeting confidence of people who fall out of a clock tower and for a moment sail through the air in a comfortable fairy-world, feeling no pain anywhere ..."
Colette married three times, gave birth to a child at the age of 40 whom she left to be raised by an English nanny, had an affair in her 50s with her 16-year-old stepson, and was forever scandalizing her French contemporaries. But she was also highly respected, the winner of all sorts of prestigious international literary awards. And when she died at the age of 81, she was the first woman in France to be honored with an official state funeral.

She once said, "What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."

And, "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

And Colette wrote: "By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet."

Virago Reading Week is hosted by Rachel and Carolyn.

Cheri and The Last of Cheri

Oh, Colette...

Your books Cheri and The Last of Cheri have put me through the emotional wringer! But I mean that in a good way. It feels as if I have walked alongside your characters as they strolled through those lovely Parisian gardens.

"Between the curving garden path a stream of red salvia wound between banks of grey-mauve Michaelmas daisies. Golden butterflies flitted as if it were summer and the scent of chrysanthemums, strengthened by the hot sun, was wafted into the garden-room. A yellowing birch tree trembled in the wind above beds of tea roses, where the last of the bees still were busy." (page 53)

Your characters are so real! They were truly the best part of this novel. First there was Lea, an aging courtesan involved with Cheri, the son of her friend Charlotte.

"Thus, for a long time, she mused over her future, veering between alarm and resignation... She saw day follow day with clockwork monotony, and herself beside Charlotte Peloux - their spirited rivalry helping the time pass. In this way, she would be spared, for many years, the degrading listlessness of women past their prime, who abandon first their stays, then their hair-dye, and who finally no longer bother about the quality of their underclothes." (page 121)

Then there was the handsome Cheri (Fred), a play-boy type half her age. The exploration of his relationship with Lea in the first book was perfectly done. The inevitable breakup comes as he marries. However, neither has fully realized the importance of their relationship or imagined how difficult ending it would prove.

In The Last of Cheri, Cheri returns from the war, changed and aged, to a loveless marriage where he finds himself superfluous in his own household. Poor man...

"...he recoiled with unspeakable repugnance from the idea of the two of them living together in a home where love no longer held sway. His childhood as a bastard, his long adolescence as a ward, had taught him that the world, though people thought of it as reckless, was governed by a code almost as narrow-minded as middle class prejudice. In it, Cheri had learned that love is a question of money, infidelity, betrayals, and cowardly resignation. But now he was well on the way to forgetting the rules he had been taught, and to be repelled by acts of silent condescension." (page 259)

And, the ending? Although predictable, it was still very powerful. My husband, upon observing my mood while reading, said a couple of times "I don't think I like the book you're reading." Whatever... I loved it and can't wait to meet a new cast of your marvelous characters. Thank you.

Teaser Tuesdays: Cheri and The Last of Cheri

"They had known each other for twenty five years. Theirs was the hostile intimacy of light women, enriched and then cast aside by one man, ruined by another: the tetchy affection of rivals stalking one another's first wrinkle or white hair. Theirs was a friendship of two practical women of the world, both adepts at the money game; but one of them a miser, and the other a sybarite. These bonds count. Rather late in their day, a stronger bond had come to link them more closely: Cheri." (page 21)

Cheri and The Last of Cheri

by Colette

This was going to be part of my Paris in July reading, but the travel bug hit early. How about if I save the review for next month?

Teaser Tuesdays is sponsored by MizB at Should Be Reading.