Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances
Three Short Novels
ISBN10: 0374527857
ISBN13: 9780374527853
Trade Paperback
336 Pages
$19.00
CA$25.00
Perhaps Colette's best-known work, Gigi is the story of a young girl being raised in a household more concerned with success and money than with the desires of the heart. But Gigi is uninterested in the dishonest society life she observes all around her and remains exasperatingly Gigi. The tale of Gigi's success in spite of her anxious family is Colette at her liveliest and most entertaining. W
ritten during the same period as Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, based on Colette's last years with her second husband, focuses on a contest of wills between Julie, an elegant woman of forty, and her ex-husband. Chance Acquaintances involves an invalid wife, her philandering husband, and music-hall dancer whose odd meeting at a French spa affects and indelibly marks each of their lives.
Reviews
Praise for Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances
"The paradoxes of great literature are those of human nature, and Colette is nothing if not human . . . Accessible and elusive; greedy and austere; courageous and timid; subversive and complacent; scorchingly honest and sublimely mendacious; an inspired consoler and an existential pessimist—these are the qualities of the artist and the woman. It is time to rediscover them."—Judith Thurman, from the Introduction
"Colette is one of the glories of France."—Michael Straight, The New Republic