Break of Day
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ISBN10: 0374528322
ISBN13: 9780374528324
Trade Paperback
168 Pages
$17.00
CA$23.00
Colette began writing Break of Day in her early fifties, at Saint-Tropez on the Côte d'Azur, where she had bought a small house after the breakup of her second marriage. The novel's theme—the renunciation of love and the return to an independent existence supported and enriched by the beauty and peace of nature—grows out of Colette's own period of self-assessment in the middle of her life. A collection of subtle reflections about love and life, it is among her most thoughtful and stylistically bold works.
Reviews
Praise for Break of Day
"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
"What delights and endears in the book is, as always, Colette's precise, tender, enchanted description of sensuous pleasure: the love she feels for a shrub cosily settled in the moist earth, the sour scent of peaches, her hand on the young man's beautiful brown chest: this is incomparable writing, even in translation."—The Times Literary Supplement
"A poetic . . . rhythmical response to the difficulties of growing old and dying."—Elaine Marks, The New York Times Book Review
"A veritable showpiece for Colette's talents."—Laurent LeSage, Saturday Review
