Gigi And The Cat

By (author) Colette
Short description/annotation:

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major new film Colette

GIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITE

Gigi’s days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions: the education of a future courtesan.

Description:

A girl is taught how to become desirable. A young wife discovers that marriage may not make her beloved.

Colette’s paired novellas ask what happens when love refuses to follow the rules.

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major film Colette.

GIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITE

In turn-of-the-century Paris, Gigi is being educated for the life of a future courtesan. Her days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions, but she remains bored by what she is taught and unconvinced by the destiny planned for her. When the wealthy Gaston begins to see her differently, Gigi surprises everyone with her own approach to love.

This edition also includes The Cat, a sharply observed novella about a young marriage undone by jealousy, possessiveness and a husband’s attachment to his beloved cat.

Together, Gigi and The Cat show Colette’s brilliance as a writer of intimacy, social performance and self-possession. These classic French novellas are elegant, sensuous and psychologically acute, ideal for readers of women’s classics and literary fiction about love, marriage and independence.

Review quote:
Colette is a kind of corsetiere of love. This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . . It''s as if all the house fronts of Paris were cut away and we could see men and women talking, dressing, brooding, loving
Review quote:
Everything that Colette touched became human... She was a complete sensualist; but she gave herself up to her senses with such delicacy of perception, with such exquisiteness of physical pain as well as physical ecstasy, that she ennobled sensualism almost to grandeur
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Sumptuous
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A perfectionist in her every word
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Her sensual prose style made her one of the great writers of twentieth-century France
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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
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She has been compared to a 20th-century female Montaigne, and it is true that her books offer a manual on how to live fearlessly and joyfully – greedily alive to every sensation and experience
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A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful
Biographical note:
Colette, the creator of Claudine, Cheri and Gigi, and one of France’s outstanding writers, had a long, varied and active life. She was born in Burgundy on 1873 into a home overflowing with dogs, cats and children, and educated at the local village school. At the age of twenty she moved to Paris with her first husband, the notorious writer and critic Henry Gauthiers-Viller (Willy). By locking her in her room, Willy forced Collette to write her first novels (the Claudine sequence), which he published under his name. They were an instant success. Colettte left Willy in 1906 and worked in music-halls as an act