43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For the educated reader, February 29, 2000
By A Customer
Colette is not an easy person to like, and this biography is dense and thick with information and literary interpretation, meaning that it's not an "easy" or quick book to read. That said it is an accomplished, thoughtful book. Judith Thruman is an excellent writer and I personally was engrossed -- I really couldn't put this book down. But it is not for everyone. It is for those interested in Colette or at least in her milieu. Thurman gives a vivid sense of the time Colette lived in, and a persuasive look at her motivations, personality, and contradictions. She shows those of us who love Colette's writing that it is possible to enjoy a writer's books without necessarily admiring that person's life and deeds. It is a facinating dicotomy: how can a person, Colette, or anyone else, be so senstitive in her writing life, yet so insensitive to those who actually surrounded her? It is a question to which there is no answer, yet one which Thurman beautifully illustrates.
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45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to ruin Colette, but this book does, February 28, 2000
Colette has been one of my favorite writers for a very long time, and I have read her work in both French and English. Not only has this author managed to make her sound like a very unpleasant person, but the translations of her writing are so poor that she sounds like a bad writer too. The author tries to use 1995 American slang for phrases written in 1905 French, and it just doesn't come off. Also, much of the translation is of a very mechanical nature and fails to convey any of the real flavor of the original. Within a very short time of starting this book, I got the feeling that the author heartily disliked her subject. She also fails utterly to express the extraordinary role Sido, Colette's mother, played in her life; to convey the lush sensory evocations that make her prose so unique; and to show the color and verve of this amazing woman's life. Instead we get a plebeian laundry list of all the people Colette met and when and where, regardless of how tiny their role was in her life--but the writing of several of her novels is glossed over lightly or omitted altogether. I am terribly sorry that so many readers who have not read Colette yet now will never do so because of this poor biography.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Comme ci, comme ca (pardon my French), June 4, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)
I bought Thurman's bio of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen in Danish after seeing "Out of Africa" in 1986 in Copenhagen, where I'm from. I never finished it, and sold it eventually. Then, two years ago I came across it in a used book store here in CA (the English edition), read it and adored it. It is one of the few books which I have read more than once. Sometimes we come back to a work of art and wonder how we could be so blind/deaf the first time around. I may feel the same way about Thurman's bio of Colette down the road, but as of today I must admit I had a tough time getting through it.
The fairly small print didn't help. Keeping track of the enormous gallery of people in her life took away a great deal of the reading pleasure, and Thurman's sentences are very long and not always "clear headed". Yes, Colette had quite a life, but somehow her life comes across as more interesting than her persona.
My favorite parts are those that tell of her complicated relationships with her parents. I learn more about myself from reading such analysis than I would from three years of therapy!
An A+: When Thurman writes about the "fin de siecle" in France she in fact shows herself to be a far better historian than biographer. (In the Dinesen bio she was both) And France around 1900 is remarkably like our world of today, which makes it very topical.
I don't know how much of the Colette bio is Thurman and how much is other biographers and that too is a big minus. Colette has been covered extensively by many writers, and I wish that Thurman had spent 1990-1998 reading, researching and writing about someone who has not been "bio'd" so often or, even better, not at all. There were a few bios on Dinesen before Thurman's, but she was almost "virgin snow" compared to Colette.
The fact that Colette was a very flawed human being doesn't mean someone should not write about her; in fact, flawed people often make the best subjects for a bio. Unfortunately, Thurman sounds at times star-struck, other times she sounds like a puritan, shocked, sometimes even somewhat envious, which of course are precisely some of the feelings and reactions that people had and still have about/to Colette. Dinesen is a much more likable person, much easier to relate to, and the movie "Out of Africa" made her the sort of romantic heroine that Colette probably never could be or would have wanted to be. Two very different women, two very different biographies. If a movie is ever made about Colette, one would hope they focus on a specific period and only a few people in her life as was done in "Out of Africa" in order to avoid the kind of horrible bio picture that Richard Attenborough's film about Chaplin was, where they rush through his entire (long) life in three hours with a "revolving door" of characters coming and going, leaving you dizzy and frustrated.
I do recommend listening to the interview archived on the Diane Rhemes (spelled correctly?) show website: (type in Thurman's name on Yahoo and it will come on the long list of Thurman webpages) She interviewed Thurman when the book came out in 1999. You can "hear" Thurman blushing at times when speaking of Colette's wild times, and perhaps that is ultimately the problem with the Colette bio: Someone uncomfortable writing about sex, lesbians, bondage, nude dancing, etc. will come across as a prude. Colette, I imagine, would have been proud to have that effect on people in the year 2002, OR maybe she'd be sad that we really have not progressed as far as we'd like.
Thanks for all the reviews - it's very interesting to read what other readers think - A virtual book club. I hope Thurman reads the reviews by the way. Writers can learn far more from "regular folks" than from critics who are feel obligated to either gush over a book or thrash it vicously, depending on who the critic is.
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