Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I had never heard of Collette before reading about this book and purchasing it. I have found the book interesting not only because of the subject but also because of the insight it provides into the time period. I downgrade it for two reasons. I agree with the other review that it is difficult to read but have found that if you stick with it, you eventually get into the flow of the writer's style. Also, it is probably more appropriate for someone who knows the subject and her work to make the complete connection with the author's comments.

"Secrets of the Flesh," Judith Thurman's superb life of Colette, guides the reader with great assurance through a wealth of complex material. Thurman won a 1983 National Book Award for "Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller." A gifted literary biographer, as sure-handed as her subject, she never conflates the life with the work or allows her admiration to interfere with an informed and delicately balanced critique of Colette's uniqueness.

"Like all those who never use their strength to the limit," Colette once wrote, "I am hostile to those who let life burn them out." Fiercely disciplined, hugely productive, the author of "Gigi" and "Chéri" lived 80 years and produced nearly 80 volumes of fiction, memoirs, journalism and drama.

She married three times, had male and female lovers and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died in 1954, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman.

Colette is a strikingly elusive writer. Packing her books with delicious clothes and furniture and ravishingly attractive people, she delivers pleasures that most "women's writers" only promise. But her prose is rarely straightforward or transparent, and her characters -- captured at the height of their beauty or in beauty's humiliating decline -- maintain a mocking, self-protective reticence.

Colette, Thurman says, was "remarkable among modern writers -- perhaps the great women in particular -- for a sense of self not vested in her mind." Maybe female writers have simply had to think harder in order to carve out space within ideologies that would otherwise have shut them out.

She drew inspiration from entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture and the fin de siècle gay aesthetes whose "fetish worship of human beauty" she shared. She admired the bravery of lives lived on the sexual edge, the consciously chosen tastes and prejudices, the risk of physical danger. Her understanding of gender was far ahead of its time; her treatment of sex between generations can still make us uneasy.

Courting dissatisfaction in love, Colette's characters nonetheless do so within one of the most satisfactory physical worlds ever depicted (who under the pseudonym Pauline Réage wrote "Story of O") remarked that Colette never neglects to describe her heroines' meals or the comforts, grand or shabby, of their bedrooms and bathrooms. Her interiors have the plenitude of gardens, and she writes magnificently of food, flowers and animals -- not analytically but, as Thurman says, "from the point of view ... of the child first 'sorting out' her paradoxical instincts and experience."

A less happy immaturity was the intellectual and moral passivity that allowed her to publish in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Nazi occupation, even as she fought devotedly (and successfully) to keep her Jewish third husband from being deported.

It's one of the great virtues of Thurman's biography that she deals unsparingly with Colette's tin ear for moral principle, locating her complacencies within contemporary French social history and popular opinion.

"Secrets of the Flesh" is a fiercely intelligent and accomplished book and -- using the words with all due weight -- an immense pleasure.

As a long-time reader and admirer of Colette's writings, I thoroughly enjoyed Judith Thurman's "Secrets of the Flesh", an accounting of Colette's life. This biography attempts neither to villefy Colette nor raise her to sainthood, but shows her to be very human, a real woman who became one of France's greatest writers. It is interesting to discover how autobiographical her writings and stories were. As an added bonus, the picture of Colette on the cover is totally mesmerizing.

On the strength of reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post, my book club selected this book as a must read. To a woman, we found this book difficult to plow through. Thurman is enamored of subordinate clauses, tangential references and elliptical thoughts. If she were a journalist, her editor would tell her that she buried her lead at every possible opportunity. The book club came away not giving a hoot about Collette, who her mother was or who either of them slept with. Bottom line: if you are a huge fan of Collette, this might be an interesting book. For the rest of us, it is not.

I am reading the book for the second time (that is rare for me), excellent insight into the movers and shakers at the last turn of the century. Great references to other writers and artists whom Colette supported financially and emotionally. I am using the names she referred to frequently to create a list of women cross referencing their stories or biographies with hers. This book gave me an improved image of Colette and a desire to read more of her material.

The farther into this book I got, the more I got the very strong feeling that at some point in her research and writing, the author came to intensely dislike Colette, particularly in her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. And after reading the book I came to dislike her too, which is a shame. I also didn't appreciate what I think was almost condemnation on Thurman's part--almost as though she thought Colette didn't deserve the respect and accolades she received throughout her life and after her death, because she was a neglectful daughter, an unfaithful wife, and a truly awful mother. Maybe, maybe not.

Colette was a favorite author of mine, 25 years ago or so while I was in high school and college. I knew many of the details of her personal life from what little biographical information I could find at that time, but not this much. Perhaps ignorance is bliss! C'est la vie.

Colette is one of those authors whose life is as fascinating as her writing, and this book ably describes the former, also containing many wonderful photos. Colette's uniquely sensitive yet unsentimental way of experiencing life has been a source of inspiration to me since I first discovered her as a preteen. One moment she can be devastated by the suffering of an animal, or write with exquisite insightfulness about the insecurities of her unconventional friends; the next she can swear off a failed marriage or friendship without a hint of pity (or self-pity). This book was very satisfying from the standpoint of her personal and family history, and contained extensive information about her long-standing affair with her teenaged stepson, which, while perhaps her most problematic moral transgression, certainly made for interesting reading. While the book was far less occupied with conveying the brilliance of Colette's writing, for that one need only go to the source. There is so much to learn from Colette's life; despite facing considerable hardships, she managed to thrive and celebrate all that she found beautiful and fascinating in nature, the theater, humanity -- really any topic to which she turned her magnificent vision. Betrayal was a major theme in her relationships, and the way that she survived and even exploited repeated psychic wounds, ultimately finding peace with a kind and compatible partner, is instructive and inspiring. She will always have a very special place in my heart, and I thank Ms. Thurman for making her more accessible.