Book details
Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances
Three Short Novels
Author: Colette; With a New Introduction by Judith Thurman; Translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor
Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances
$19.00
About This Book
Book Details
Two volumes of Colette's most beloved works, with a new Introduction by Judith Thurman.
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. Written 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, a novella, involves an invalid wife, her philandering husband, and a music-hall dancer whose odd meeting at a French spa affects and indelibly marks each one of their lives.
Imprint Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN
9780374527853
In The News
“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. Its is time to rediscover them.” —From the Introduction
“Colette is one of the glories of France.” —Michael Straight, The New Republic