Customer Reviews

The Ripening Seed (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

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This is a great book, with vivid characters and plenty of moral complexity. It is about the affair of a very
young man with an older woman, who uses him yet at the same time reflects the emptiness of her life and her
enjoyment of control. You also get a wider view of the consequences of their affair on the delicate balance of his other
relationships, particularly with his childhood lover. And the "relations" are handled with extreme dexterity and delicacy,
never going for cheap thrills. It is packed with descriptions of sensations and thought, beautifully poetic and dense,
requiring re-reading and reflection from the reader.

Taken together, it emerges as a subtle and unusually stimulating reading experience. Collette truly was underrated.

Warmly recommended.

The characters in this novel are both fascinatingly "other" while at the same time easy to indentify with. The book captures how it feels to be young and in love, to be young and misunderstood, to be experienced and bitter, to feel torn between two selves. The novel shows us both hard and loveable sides of each of three main characters--constantly challenging our desire to judge and fix each character's nature in one place. The book ends ambiguously as if we really had encountered these people in life and then suddenly lost touch. The two seductions of a 16-year-old boy--first by a 30-year-old woman and secondly by a 15-year-old girl--are presented without any vulgarity but in a way that makes clear the sordid nature of the sex which is close to rape. The connection between sex, desire, power, and competition is richly treated.

I can't agree that Colette is under-rated. (Not in her native France, certainly. After all, she was the first woman ever given a state funeral.) But this peculiarly intense novella does deserve as much recognition as the more widely heralded "Cheri" and "Claudine" books.

What stands in its way is a sophistication and subtlety so profoundly French that, even translated into English, the narrative sometimes seems to be in a foreign language. The nearest American literature equivalent I can think of is Henry James's "The Sacred Fount", which is also a love story explored on such a psychologically deep level that it can be hard to know what exactly is going on.

But even at her murkiest, Colette never fails to provide a spectacular mimesis of the natural world. The reader may all but recline in the flower-filled meadows, the warmth of the sun on his face cooled by fragrant breezes. Her insightful portrayal of what another writer called "the wrung loins of boyhood" can be considered a rich bonus.

Set in summer in Brittanny, Vinca and Phillipe are childhood friends who are awakening to sexuality.Phillipe has an affair with an older woman, a theme taken from Colette's own life. The affair has a lasting effect on the teenage lovers. This book is provocative, as only Colette could be on the subject of sex.