Paris In July: Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir

 

I am extremely pleased with myself for finally finishing this book! I bought it more than ten years ago on a visit to the Frick Museum in New York City, when I went to see an exhibit of Dutch masters. Apparently they didn't have anything else in the gift shop and but the pretty cover of this NYRB classic (it's a detail from Garden at the Rue Cortot, Montmartre painted in 1876, below. It's at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh). 

So. I've owned this book forever and I know I've put it on my list of books to read for Paris in July multiple times. I finally cracked it open a couple of weeks ago and though it's not a fast read, I really enjoyed it. I love art and I'm fascinated by the lives of artists. I wouldn't say Renoir is my favorite Impressionist but I really gained a new appreciation of his work from reading this book. 

Originally published in 1958, it's a memoir by filmmaker Jean Renoir, Auguste Renoir's middle son. Jean was wounded during WWI and as he convalesced with his elderly father, who was already crippled with rheumatism, the younger Renoir spent a lot of time talking to his father about the artist's life. The book is a combination of a biography of his father's life and his own recollections growing up in Paris and various other parts of France. The family often spent summers in the countryside in various parts of France, particularly Essoys in Burgundy, where his mother Aline was born, and later in the south of France, near Nice (I was actually lucky enough to visit Nice a few years ago and was sadly unaware that there's a Renoir museum just 20 minutes away in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in his final home. I did get to visit the Chagall Museum and the Matisse Museum, so I really wouldn't complain but I wish I'd known!)

It's quite an interesting memoir about Renoir's life and how became and artist and met up with his fellow Impressionists. He's one of the most prolific of the group, with at least 4000 paintings to his record (and the book includes stories about other paintings that were lost or stolen which just made me aghast. Some were literally used to patch up holes in a leaky roof). 

There are also great stories about the other painters including one about his good friend Gustave Caillebotte, who named Renoir executor of his estate and personal art collection after his death. Apparently it was Caillebotte's wish that the collection be given to the Louvre who didn't want the whole collection and turned 2/3 of it away. The third that they kept was stored away in the Luxembourg Museum. After his widow's death they just went to various heirs and were mostly sold outside France. Well, France's loss is the world's gain, I suppose! 

I feel very fortunate to have been to Philadelphia last year where I saw the biggest single collection of Renoir's works at the Barnes Foundation, a total of 181! Barnes was a huge art collector and began amassing Impressionist works in the 1920s. His entire house was designed to showcase his collection and was eventually left to the city of Philadelphia as a private museum. The collection was eventually moved to a larger space in downtown Philadelphia which resembles the original house with the exact layout of the all the artworks. If you ever get the chance it's absolutely worth visiting! 

I'm also extremely fortunate to live only a short drive away from the Phillips Collection Museum in DC near Dupont Circle. One of the highlights of the collection is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. The last time I visited one of the docents told me that Phillips and Barnes were rival collectors. Phillips was annoyed that Barnes had the bigger collection of Renoirs but always bragged that he had the best one. 

Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881.
Renoir's future wife Aline is in the left hand corner with the little dog;
Renoir's friend and fellow Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte is on the lower left leaning back. 

I enjoyed visiting Renoir's world but the book is pretty dense and took a lot longer to finish than I expected -- I am rather behind on Paris in July reading list and also my Big Book Summer Reading Challenge! But this book was on both lists and I'm also counting this as my Classic Nonfiction for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

Cover of a 1969 reprint. This one is pretty much perfect.

So, how is everyone's summer reading going? Anyone in the mood for a beach read that turns out to be full of death and destruction? The Feast by Margaret Kennedy was reprinted last summer and WOW. I put it on my Christmas list last year and saved it to read until this summer. If you're looking for a summer read that packs a real punch, this is it. 

Published in 1949, this is basically a morality tale that tells you upfront that people are going to die -- this is NOT a spoiler, it's the setup. The book begins a prologue: the annual meeting of two friends, a minister in Cornwall and his summer visitor (they're hardly in the book, so their names are not really important). They normally begin the visit with an evening of chess, but the host needs to put off their game in order to finish a sermon for the following day -- a eulogy for a group of people who tragically perished when a cliff collapses on top of a summer resort, leaving nothing but a massive pile of rubble. 

However, we do know that there were some survivors among the resort's guests -- but who? 

The copy of my edition.
Nice, but I don't think it really reflects the setting of the book. 

The book then jumps back seven days and describes the final week of the resort and its inhabitants. Set in 1947, the Siddal family are struggling to make ends meet in their ancestral home on the Cornish coast and have converted it to a boarding house, not so much a hotel. Mrs. Siddal is trying to make a go of it but her husband has mentally checked out and doesn't lift a finger, hiding in a room under the stairs. Her three grown sons help but are ready to leave the nest. There are also some servants including Miss Ellis, a snobbish, gossipy housekeeper and Nancibel, the loyal housemaid. Then there are the guests, including two families, the wealthy Gifford family with four children; the Coves, with three; an unhappy couple, the Paleys, who are grieving for their dead daughter; plus an obnoxious clergyman, his put-upon daughter Evangeline; and a late arrival, a bestselling author and her chauffeur. It's almost like an Agatha Christie novel, but instead of a murder, it's a natural disaster, and the reader has to work out who will live and who will die. 

The original 1949 cover. Good, but I like the 1969 cover better. 

This book took a bit for me to get into, but after the first few pages, I was hooked. It's divided up by the seven days of the final week for the resort, and each has many short sections (too short to really call chapters) covering the many characters in the book. And there are a LOT of characters, more than twenty. Some of the children are really minor characters, but it didn't take long to keep everyone straight. They're mostly really well developed and the plot got me completely engrossed, so I was able to speed through it quickly -- it's more than 400 pages long, and the last day I read almost the last hundred pages in a single sitting. It is THAT GOOD. 

A French edition from 1956

Towards the end I began to have a terrible sense of foreboding -- of course the reader already knows that disaster is looming but there is a lot of foreshadowing. I absolutely had favorite characters and I was dreading the end because I'm always worried if someone I like will be killed off. If you want hints about the plot and the outcome, feel free to read the introduction which gives some very strong hints. I have given up reading introductions because of spoilers so I was blown away by the ending. I am glad that I did go back and read it because there was some subtext that I had definitely missed. 

A new French reprint. Good, but a little too cheerful for what's inside the book.

This is an absolutely brilliant book and I know it will be one of my top reads of the summer, if not the entire year. I've only read one other book by Margaret Kennedy, Troy Chimneys, which is also good but very different from this one. Several of her other books are still in print including her other most famous book, The Constant Nymph, which I also own and will definitely move up on the to-read pile. 

I'm counting this as my Classic Set In A Place You'd Like To Visit for the Back to the Classics Challenge. It's also the first read for my Big Book Summer Reading Challenge.

Big Book Summer Reading Challenge 2022

Time for another Big Book Summer Reading Challenge hosted by Suzan at Book by Book! Alas, I still have too many unread books. Let's see if I can shrink the pile just a little this summer. Here is my stack of hopeful reads: 

1. They Were Counted by Miklos Banffy (624 pp)
2. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (616 pp)
3. Night Falls on the City by Sarah Gainham (632 pp)
4. Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood (495 pp)
5. My American by Stella Gibbons (480 pp)
6. A London Family by Molly Hughes (600 pp)
7. The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (448 pp)
8. Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir (456 pp)
9. The Gods Arrive by Edith Wharton (454 pp)
10. The Most of P. G. Wodehouse (701 pp)

Nearly all of them count for other challenges -- Back to the Classics, the TBR Pile Challenge, and the European Reading Challenge. I'm cheating a little this year by choosing mostly fiction which are normally much quicker than nonfiction. I do love a great big fat biography but since I'm so far behind this year I'm going for more novels instead; only three of this list are nonfiction and one volume is (mostly) short stories.  I'm hoping that most of them are fast reads. I know I won't finish them all but we can dream, right?

Which one should I read first -- and are there any I should just donate to my Little Free Library? Please let me know in the comments! And what's on your list for the Big Book Summer Reading Challenge?

We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen

 

I've settled in nicely for Big Book Summer, and at one point last in June I was simultaneously reading THREE giant books between 600 and 900 pages long -- not the best strategy for finishing them in a timely manner. As per usual, one of them really grabbed me and the others were neglected. I plowed through We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen, finishing it in only five days. 

Originally published in Danish, it's the fictionalized story  of several generations of a fishing town in southern Denmark called Marstal, spanning just about 100 years. The story begins in 1848 when several of the local sailors are enlisted in the navy to fight the German rebels who have decided they don't want to live under Danish rule any more. Though they bring fully armed ships to blast the German port, they're utterly routed and Laurids Masden, one of the Danes from Marstal, is literally blown into the sky. Miraculously, he survives and becomes a local celebrity, until the fame (among other issues) is too much for him, and he promptly takes to the seas and essentially disappears.

When his son Albert is old enough, he also becomes a sailor, and spends years searching for his long-lost father, spanning the globe. Eventually he returns to Marsden, but is plagued by terrible visions of friends and neighbors embroiled in war. 

War was like sailing. You could learn about clouds, wind direction, and currents, but the sea remained forever unpredictable. All you could do was adapt to it and try to return home alive.

I really enjoyed this book, with some quibbles. I loved all the sailing parts, as I'm fascinated by ships and sailing, and I love traveling anywhere by boat. I also really enjoyed all the historical and travel aspects. However, I was not thrilled with how the women in this book were portrayed -- that is, hardly at all, or as mothers or romantic interests for the male characters. And one of the female characters is so sexually and racially stereotyped it made me cringe (there's also more racism and racist stereotyping than I was expecting for a book written and published in the 21st century). 

Also, the structure of this book is sort of odd. It alternates between being told in the first and third person, and it's never quite clear who the first-person narrator is -- it's almost like the author couldn't decide and just stuck with it. 

Overall, though, I did really like it and got absorbed by the characters and storytelling. A great, sprawling book for armchair traveling if you can't travel anywhere, or a perfect beach or airplane read if you can. 

I'm counting this as my Danish selection for the European Reading Challenge; also counts for the Big Book Summer Challenge and the Chunkster Challenge.

Big Book Summer Challenge 2021

Time for another Big Book Summer Challenge! I was so happy to find Suzan's challenge last year -- I finished ten big fat books, eight of which were from my own shelves. I've been trying to whittle away at the longest books at my TBR shelves. I'm down to about 25, and if all goes as planned I'll have finished half of them by the end of the summer. Here's what I have left to read:

Nonfiction: (11)

The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher (749 pp)

Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Postwar Britain by Simon Garfield (544 pp)
Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood (495 pp)
Trollope by Victoria Glendinning (551 pp)
Slipstream: A Memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard (528 pp)
A London Family, 1870-1900 by Molly Hughes (600 pp)
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee (869 pp)
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (744 pp)

Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace, 1939-1949 by Virginia Nicholson (508 pp)

The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla (638 pp) [library book]
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater (696 pp)

Novels: (8)

We Were Counted by Miklos Banffy (596 pp)

The Complete Claudine by Collette (656 pp)
Painting the Darkness by Robert Goddard (608 pp)
Bella Poldark by Winston Graham (688 pp)
Penmarric by Susan Howatch (735 pp)

The Kellys and the O'Kellys by Anthony Trollope (537 pp)

Ralph the Heir by Anthony Trollope (770 pp)
Marcella by Mrs. Humphrey Ward (560 pp)


Short Story Collections: (7)

Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens (680 pp)

The World Over: The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Vol. II (681 pp)
The Portable Dorothy Parker (626 pp)
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (495 pp)
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (640 pp)
The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton (640 pp)
The Most of P. G. Wodehouse (701 pp)

I'd love to finish at least ten this summer --  I've already started The Art of Eating by M. F. K. Fisher, though it won't count for the challenge since I've been reading it off and on for a couple of months. My goal is to read at least three from each list. Last year I finished ten, but half of them were fiction, which is faster for me than nonfiction. I also ended up reading two books that weren't on my original list. Top of my list this year include Bella Poldark (final novel in the Poldark series), Edith Wharton's biography, the Maugham stories, and the Wodehouse stories.

Bloggers, which of these should I read first? And is there anything I should skip reading and just donate to my local Little Free Library? What big fat books are on your reading list this summer?

Big Book Summer Wrap-Up

Summer is officially over, and so is the Big Book Summer Challenge hosted by Suzan at Book By Book. I'm very pleased because I finished ten very long books this summer! Eight were from my original list, and two were e-books that I'd been wanting to read. Here's what I read: 

Altogether I finished ten big fat books, seven in print, two on e-book, and one (mostly) audiobook: 

Nonfiction: (3)

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (592 pp)
Roughing It by Mark Twain (592 pp)
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (622 pp)

Fiction:(5)

Imperial Palace by Arnold Bennett (769 pp)
The Twisted Sword by Winston Graham (646 pp)

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili (944 pp)
Temptation by Janos Szekeley (685 pp)
John Caldigate by Anthony Trollope (656 pp)
The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton (652 pp)

Short Stories: (1)

East and West: The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Vol. I (955 pp)

Of course, some of these books were actually not as long as expected, due to margins, font size, illustrations, etc. The nonfiction books also had indices and appendices. 

The longest book was The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, and the shortest was actually The Fruit of the Tree, though it doesn't look it.  Altogether, my total number of pages read for this challenge:  7,113!  (I also read some shorter books this summer to break it up). 

I enjoyed all the books for the most part. I think my least favorite was Roughing It and my favorites were Temptation, The Warmth of Other Suns, and Imperial Palace. I still love big fat books and plant to keep reading them -- there's still almost 30 books left on my original list! I have some other challenges coming up this fall and hope to finish some more by the end of the year -- and some shorter books too. 

Bloggers, how was your summer of reading? Did you finish any great big books, and what's on the horizon for your fall reading plans? And thanks again to Suzan for hosting, I hope we'll do it again next year!

Roughing It by Mark Twain: Tall Tales (and Some Racism) in the American West

Published in 1872, Roughing It is a semi-fictional account of Mark Twain's travels and misadventures in the American west during the 1860s. The story begins with Twain eagerly accompanying his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory, where Orion has been appointed Secretary. After an extensive stagecoach journey, he spends time in Nevada before visiting Salt Lake City, then failing as a miner in California. Twain begins to support himself by taking various writing and newspaper jobs, which eventually take him to Hawaii. 

This book is full of wry humor and amusing descriptions of life in the Wild West, including some tall tales and colorful characters. However, it's sprinkled throughout with a lot of racist comments -- Twain is particularly unpleasant about native Americans and Hawaiians, though he includes pretty much every non-white group in American at the time. I realize this was the prevailing attitude of the times, but honestly, there were some serious yikes moments for me. It was very disconcerting because there would be amusing chapters about ridiculous characters and situations  -- and some not so ridiculous, but downright scary, like the time Twain and his companions set off a massive forest fire. In another instance, Twain and his companions were trapped on a tiny island in the middle of an alkali lake after their boat drifted off. A storm was brewing and they narrowly escaped perishing (if the story is to be believed).

This was a slow book, and I listened to most of it on an audio download from my library. There are several editions available. Mine was read by Robin Field who is an excellent narrator, and I probably would have given up on the book much earlier if I had just been reading the print copy. 

Honestly, the only reason I read this book was because I'd bought a copy years ago and it was on my pile for the Big Book Summer Challenge, and also on my Classics Club list. If it hadn't been available on audio I probably wouldn't have stuck with it. Twain is good at spinning out an entertaining yarn, and if you like a dry and occasionally ridiculous style of humor, it's mildly amusing if you can skip over the racism. I also have a copy of Twain's Letters From Hawaii that I bought in Waikiki about ten years ago. It's much shorter and I may give it a go in a few months just to get it off the shelves and donate it to the Little Free Library on my street.

Imperial Palace by Arnold Bennett: Upstairs and Downstairs in a London Hotel

He knew the exact number of guests staying in the hotel that night; but their secrets, misfortunes, anxieties, hopes, despairs, tragedies, he did not know. And he would have liked to know every one of them, to drench himself in the invisible fluid of mortal things. He was depressed. He wanted sympathy, and to be sympathetic, to merge into humanity. But he was alone. He had no close friend, no lovely mistress -- save the Imperial Palace. The Palace was his life. And what was the Palace, the majestic and brilliant offspring of his creative imagination and of his organising brain? It had been everything. Now, for the moment, it was naught.

Imperial Palace by Arnold Bennett has been on my TBR pile for about 10 years, since I found a copy for $1 at the library's used Book Cellar. I was really hoping it would be the book assigned by the latest Classics Club Spin, I thought I'd try and tackle it anyway as part of my Big Book Summer reading challenge.

Set in the late 1920s, it's approximately a year in the life of two hotel employees at the eponymous hotel, a swank London establishment (based on the luxurious Savoy hotel). The manager, Evelyn Orcham, is in his late forties and has devoted his life to the hospitality business, working his way up from the bottom. He's now at the top of his profession, the most respected hotel manager in London. The other main character is Violet Powler, a young manager from the hotel's laundry division, who Orcham promotes to floor housekeeper and begins to fast-track her career to bigger and better things in the hotel. 

Their stories are intertwined with the arrival of the blustering Sir Henry Savott (baronet) and his impulsive daughter Gracie, one of the Bright Young Things of the London set, known for her fast cars and eccentric ways. It's mostly set in the hotel and supporting establishments, and follows their lives amid the day-to-day workings of the hotel, including difficult guests, a merger, a massive holiday celebration, love affairs, jealousy, gossipy employees, and potential scandals. It's a bit like Downton Abbey, only set in a 1920s hotel instead of a country house. (It also reminded me of Norman Collins' Bond Street Story, which I also loved). 

The lobby of the famous Savoy Hotel in London, inspiration for the Imperial Palace.
It is so posh I was afraid to go inside.

And the story is long, nearly 800 pages. It's not a difficult read, but I found myself reading it fairly slowly, spreading it out over several weeks. There are a lot of short chapters, like a Victorian novel, so there were plenty of stopping points; also, I really didn't want it to end. For the most part, I really enjoyed the characters, and I loved being in their world. I had a particular interest in this novel because years ago, I was employed at a large hotel in Chicago, where I worked in the kitchens as a pastry cook for almost two years. Of course I didn't see nearly all the minutiae of housekeeping and guests, but I learned a lot about how much work is involved in running a large operation, keeping all the departments coordinated and the logistics of large events. In the kitchens alone we had to deal with catering, ordering, stocking, room service, stewarding, and so on. A hotel is like a giant machine and all the parts fit together, and I am always fascinated by how much work goes into coordinating everything. Based on my own experience, Bennett must have had first-hand knowledge of how a hotel was run because that aspect of the book seemed really authentic. (Bennett also wrote about hotels in the much shorter novella The Grand Babylon Hotel, and briefly in The Old Wives' Tale). 

That being said, this novel was published in 1930 and there are some racist and sexist bits that made me roll my eyes. The hotel manager Orcham doesn't seem to think much of women's intelligence unless they are useful to him, and both the main characters are pretty xenophobic -- there are actual Italian and French employees, the horror! And I was pretty sure I knew how the book would end up, but there was one outcome that I did not like one bit, it was so sexist. 

Overall, though, I really did enjoy this book and it will probably be one of my favorites for the year. 

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvilli

I first heard about The Eighth Life a few months ago, but I knew immediately that I wanted to read it. More than nine hundred pages about a family in Eastern Europe, over six generations? More than a hundred years of a family's history? A book in translation? Yes please, this is exactly the sort of book I love. But I'm not going to lie, this book, as you might expect, is A LOT. 

I should back up a bit and give as much summary as possible. The story begins with a prologue: Nizia, Stasia's great granddaughter, is living in Berlin and gets a frantic phone call from her mother. Nizia's niece Brilka, aged 12, has left her ballet group in Amsterdam and is on a train to Vienna, alone, on some kind of wild-goose chase. Nizia agrees to find her niece and bring her back to Tbilsi. The story then goes back more than a hundred years, to tell the history of six generations of the Jashi family, beginning with Stasia, a young Georgian dancer who is forced to give up her dreams of the Bolshoi Ballet and instead marries a dashing young officer in the early 20th century. Nizia narrates the story as though she's telling her family's history to Brilka. 

She remains with her family as he goes off on assignment, then they are separated by the Russian revolution. We learn about Stasia's beautiful sister Christine, who living a fabulous life in Tbilisi society until she attracts the attention of an important party leader; about Stasia's two children: Kostya, a promising Russian naval officer; and Kitty, a talented folk singer; Kostya's spoiled daughter Elene, the mother of narrator Nizia; and Nizia's sister Daria, a beautiful actress. Along the way there are world wars, revolutions, sieges, torture, heartbreak, murder, and terrible things happen to everyone along the way. There is also a magical chocolate recipe that is supposed to be some kind of curse but is really only a very minor part of the book (and I was really hoping for a recipe that never appeared.)

Haratischvilli interweaves real events and people (named and unnamed) in the book, so I learned a bit about Georgian and Russian history and geography. I do admit to skimming over some of the politics mentioned in the book. These characters experience a lot of tragedy and heartache -- honestly, I'm shocked that everyone in Georgia doesn't have PTSD or worse. I cannot even imagine living through even a fraction of what these characters have experienced. 

Great cover on this Turkish edition

Overall, I really liked this book and being able to spend so much time with the characters. There are a lot of great strong women in this family (though they seem to have terrible taste in men). I did prefer the first half of the book to the second -- the narrator, Nizia, is actually my least favorite character in the book. She does some things that seem really unbelievable and overly convenient to the plot. However, I was so absorbed in the family's story and all the other characters that I stayed along with it until the end. I was not disappointed, though I was hoping for more chocolate. 

The Eighth Life was first published in German in 2014, and finally translated into English in 2019. I love reading books in translation -- I know so many of my books are mid-century British and classics and I really want to expand a little bit. It is Women in Translation Month so this ties in nicely. It also ties in as my Georgian selection for the European Reading Challenge, and towards my Big Book Summer Challenge.

Paris in July: Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

Colette's 'virile' genius . . . justified the excesses of her life. "Let us give her the complete freedom of her actions," Rachilde exclaimed. "She is is one of those who would shake the stars while falling from the skies into the mud of our poor earth."

I'd only heard of Colette as the author of Gigi and Cheri -- I'd never actually watched either of the movies, nor heard of the Claudine novels until about a year ago, when I watched the film starring Keira Knightley based on this biography. I actually saw the film in a tiny movie theater in Nice, France, while spending a long weekend while we lived in Germany; normally,  I wouldn't spend precious holiday time watching a movie, but the theater was less than five minutes' walk from my hotel, and there was a late showing. And how cool is it that I saw a movie (albeit in English) about a French writer while in France?

So, naturally, I had to order Colette's biography Secrets of the Flesh as soon as I returned home. I didn't get around to it at the time, but it's a perfect summer read, for Paris in July and also the Big Book Summer Challenge. I'm always interested in the lives of writers, but I had no idea how scandalous and groundbreaking her life was. Considered the greatest woman writer of France, she wrote 30 books, plus plays, essays, screenplays, and published hundreds of articles and reviews as a journalist. She acted on stage and was notorious for her affairs with both men and women, and married three times. 

If you haven't seen the film, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) married the writer/publisher Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as Willy), 14 years her senior, when she was just 20. Willy published a lot of books written by ghostwriters, and when the couple was in need of cash, he took Colette's notebooks, loosely based on her childhood, and published the first story (under his own name) as Claudine at School, the story of a spunky and scandalous girl growing up in a country town. It became an instant success, and three more Claudine novels followed. Colette and Willy became a celebrated couple in intellectual and literary circles. 

Keira Knightley as Colette and Dominic West as her husband Willy

They also had a troubled marriage plagued by affairs on both sides (once with the same woman!) and eventually split. (It didn't help that in 1907 Colette discovered he'd sold the copyright to her Claudine novels for a pittance). Colette scandalized society by acting on the stage, sometimes semi-nude, and was publicly out as a bisexual. In one production, she caused a near-riot by kissing her female lover onstage. 

Like the Claudine stories, much of her work was semi-autobiographical, before or after the fact. Echoing the plot of Cheri, Claudine had an affair with her stepson Bertrand de Jouvenel from her second marriage (the half-brother of her only child) when he was only sixteen, and she was in her late 40s. The scandal was one of the factors for her second divorce. But the marriage to her third husband Maurice Goudeket (16 years younger than Colette) lasted until her death at age 81.

Colette's career spanned the Belle Epoque, World War I, the 1920s, the rise of Nazism, and World War II. Weirdly, she wrote for a pro-Nazi newspaper during the War, and her last novel has some seriously anti-Semitic overtones -- though her last husband was Jewish and was actually imprisoned by the Gestapo for a few months (he was only released due to the intervention of the French wife of the German ambassador. Maurice spent the rest of the war in Paris but the couple was always in fear of a second arrest).

Colette c. 1896 painted by Jacques Humbert

I don't think Colette is someone I would have liked to meet in real life -- she sounds very self-absorbed, probably narcissistic, and some of her actions were really questionable. She was a real paradox -- she didn't believe in feminism but she wanted to work; she was bisexual but didn't approve of her daughter's homosexuality; she wrote for an anti-Semitic paper, yet her husband was Jewish. Maybe she believed that she should be the exception? 

However, she did lead a fascinating life. I found it so interesting how she was able to make a career for herself as a writer and celebrity for more than fifty years, especially as a woman in that time period -- she wrote about 30 novels, plus plays, essays, and countless articles and reviews. It's very impressive for a woman to have been such a prolific writer in the first half of the 20th century, especially in France where women couldn't even vote until 1944. It's a really interesting look at life at the time period. Even though I've still only read one of her novels I found it an absorbing piece of social history. 

I do want to finish the Claudine novels (I have the Complete Claudine edition) and eventually Gigi and Cheri. I've also checked out the film version of Gigi from the library and hope to get to it by the end of the month. How's everyone else doing with Paris in July and the Big Book Summer Challenge?

The Twisted Sword: The Pentultimate Poldark Novel

I can't believe I'm on the 11th novel in this series, and I never blogged about it. I used to read a lot of historical novels, then I kind of got away from them when I got hooked on mid-century women's fiction. I only started reading the Poldark series after watching the PBS series when it first aired, the summer of 2015 when I was in Outlander withdrawal. I loved the first series which covers the first two novels, and promptly read the first ten books in less than a year. I'm not sure why I stopped there but suspect it had something to do with our big overseas move to Germany the summer of 2016. Our new library didn't have the last two novels, but on a trip to London that summer, I went to three different bookstores to find them -- and promptly left them gathering dust on the TBR shelves until now, prompted by my Big Book Summer Challenge. 

It is a little hard to get back into a series after a four-year reading gap (some of the supporting characters were a little fuzzy, but my edition thoughtfully included a family tree), but essentially, the book picks up pretty soon after the previous book, in the peace of 1815. Ross and Demelza's older children are grown and married, and Ross gets a summons to help out as an "observer" in France (and gets a baronetcy thrown in for good measure). Ross, Demelza, and the two youngest children head off to Paris, for what seems to be a good time, but that wacky Napoleon escapes from Elba and makes a triumphant return. [Bonus: this book also counts for Paris in July!]

This cover reminds me of a YA fantasy novel. 

Ross is on an assignment and gets separated from Demelza and the children, who flee to Brussels, where she meets up with her oldest son Jeremy and his new bride. Ross gets caught up in the war, so I had another perspective of the Battle of Waterloo, my second this year! But from the Coalition (Allied) side this time. My knowledge of French history is quite fuzzy and I didn't realize that Waterloo actually took place after Napoleon escaped from Elba, shame on me. There are a lot of descriptions of the horrors of war. I have been meaning to read La Debacle, Zola's masterful war novel, this summer, but maybe I'll put it off. 

Nice cover on this edition, I think it's the Polish translation


.

Sadly the war doesn't end well for everyone in the book. Meanwhile, back in Cornwall, the eldest Poldark daughter Clowance and her new husband are having money troubles, no thanks in part to George Warleggan. There are also some appearances by George's son Valentine; everyone's favorite doctor, Dwight Enys; and some local color with a pregnant housemaid who may or may not marry a local guy to give her baby a father. 

After a bit of confusion, I settled nicely into this 656 page chapter of the Poldark family, and ended up racing through it in less than a week. It's amazing how fast I started to remember details and characters (though a few are still a bit fuzzy and I've already requested the previous book from the library, so I can skim through it). Winston Graham was really good at creating the world of Cornwall from the time period. I loved most of the good characters and became outraged at the bad ones (George Warleggan has been carrying grudges against the Poldarks for how many years now?)

My only quibble was that the youngest daughter, Isabella Rose, is only THIRTEEN when the book starts and men are already courting her, ewww. I think Graham was setting up the story for the final book which is named after her. It's another 688 pages and I'm sure I will read it with enjoyment and more than a little sadness because the book series is ending. I've watched most of the TV series and unfortunately have gotten really bored with it, I didn't even finish the final season. Maybe I'll have to give it another try after I finish the final novel. I also own another long novel set in Cornwall called Penmarric and I'm looking forward to that one also.

How's everyone else doing with their summer reading? And can anyone recommend another great historical TV series and movies? 

The Fruit of the Tree: Edith Wharton Tackles Some Big Issues

Whenever I find a little-known book by a famous author, I always wonder whether it's sadly neglected, overlooked, or . . . is it just not that good? Is there a reason why nobody reads it? This was my thought when I picked up The Fruit of the Tree, a 1907 novel written by one of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton. Written exactly between The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome (two of my all-time favorite classics) I was curious to know why this novel is so little read.

Juxtaposing both the society characters she knew so well and the social commentary, it's the story of John Amherst, a young, idealistic assistant manager at a large mill in the fictional town of Hanaford, probably somewhere in New England or upstate New York. We first meet Amherst in a hospital as he checks on the condition of a worker badly injured on the job. The doctor on duty (related by marriage to the factory's manager) stoutly protests that he'll recover, but privately, a volunteer nurse reveals to Amherst that the injured man will most certainly lose a hand, if not his entire arm.

Amherst is determined to change working conditions in the factory, and his chance arises the next day -- the factory's owner, newly widowed Bessy Westmore, is here to tour the factory she now controls after her husband's death. The factory manager is home ill, so Amherst seizes his chance to tell Mrs. Westmore the truth about the factory, and his hopes to improve it. He's young, handsome, and idealistic, and Mrs. Westmore is young, beautiful, and lonely, so one thing leads to another and they wind up getting married.

"He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man."

Of course, nothing is easy or happy in a Wharton novel, and a few years later, neither John nor Bessy is happy. Bessy resents the time John spends at the factory, not to mention the money the improvements are costing, and John is disappointed that Bessy doesn't seem to share his hopes to make real changes. He's getting tired of fighting Bessy's family and the people influencing her to keep him out of the mill.

Meanwhile, the young nurse, Justine Brent has also reappeared -- coincidentally she's an old school mate of Bessy's who fell on hard times and had to make a career for herself. Amherst engages her as a personal nurse/companion to Bessy, but as his relationship to his wife cools, he finds himself more and more attracted to Justine and her sense of social justice.

There are some big, dramatic plot twists, and then it turns into a bit of a sensation novel, but much wordier (imagine Wilkie Collins and Henry James writing a novel together and stole the setting from Elizabeth Gaskell). It kind of alternated between being slow and cerebral, with dramatic events. I'd get bored but then all of a sudden something super-dramatic would happen, then it would slow down again. I don't know if it's quarantine brain, but I was having a hard time with the more cerebral bits.

The setting definitely reminded me of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and there are definitely plot elements that foreshadow Ethan Frome -- there's a sledding scene that is symbolic, but not nearly as pivotal as Ethan Frome. Wharton also touches on some issues which must have been very controversial for their time. I suppose this could be why it just isn't as popular as some of her other works.

I was also a bit put off by the fact that my Virago edition was 633 pages long! However, when I started reading it, I realized there was an awful lot of white space on each page, the margins are huge. I compared it to my Modern Library copy of House of Mirth which is less than 350 pages long. I checked the iBooks downloads, and they're really almost the same length. And there are hardly any editions in print. I checked the page count from the original 1907 copy and it's the same, so I suspect they're just using the same plates as the first edition. So I guess technically it counts toward the Big Book Summer Challenge.

I'm glad I read it because I am huge Wharton fan, but I don't know if I'd really recommend it. However, it's one more book crossed off my Classics Club List and one more off my owned-and-unread shelves. I still own Hudson River Bracketed but I might have to take a break from Wharton, maybe I'll tackle her biography instead. 

The Complete Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Vol. I: East and West

Not the same edition as mine, but I love these Vintage International covers. 

One of my particular goals for the Big Book Summer Challenge is to finally read some of the enormous volumes of short stories in my unread book collection -- I probably have twenty short story collections unread, and at least eight of them are over 500 pages long! I'm hoping to finish at least one per month.

I started with the most daunting volume: a 955 page volume of the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, one of my favorite writers. I loved Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil, and his novella Up at the Villa is one my all-time favorites, I probably read it every year. I'm pretty sure I bought this this two-volume set of his Complete Short Stories at Friends of the Library book sale, and I probably paid one dollar for each (they're 1953 reprints and I think you can find them online for under $5.) Despite the length of the book, it was easy to finish in less than a month -- my goal was one short story a day. There are 30 stories in this volume, and they're all fairly long, about 30 pages each. 

Not a particularly exciting cover, but a nice edition.

Maugham often starts his stories with a character (often himself, in the first person) meeting people and having stories told to them, as a sort of narrative framing device. It works very well in the South Sea stories, since they're often told by colonials who seem desperate for someone new to talk to. There was also a story called "The Book-Bag" which is rather dark, but has a wonderful introduction by the anonymous narrator describing his love of reading and obsessive need to travel with an enormous bag full of books, which delighted me. It's rather long but here's an excerpt:

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works.

Some the stories in this volume are among Maugham's most famous, including "The Letter," about a plantation owner's wife who shoots a family friend and is on trial for murder. It was adapted into a stage play and then into a film starring Bette Davis in 1940. I particularly loved "Jane," about a plain woman who becomes the toast of British society, much to the chagrin of her fashionable sister-in-law; and "The Creative Impulse" about a pretentious woman writer and her celebrated salons. A lot of his stories have wonderful twist endings that were normally unexpected. 

It also includes most of the Ashenden stories, also available in a separate volume (which I also own). Ashenden is a British spy, loosely based on Maugham's own work for the British government as an intelligence agent during World War I. (He spoke French and German fluently, and his job as a writer made an excellent cover for him). I enjoyed these stories but they're not exactly cloak-and-dagger, James Bond stuff. Like Maugham himself, Ashenden's job is to make contact with local field agents and pass information back to the home office, often encoded (Maugham was based in Geneva and used to encode messages in his manuscripts). Fun fact: intelligence agents nearly always get local people to spy and sell them information, they don't take on new identities and use Deep Cover -- that's strictly movie fodder. Not what I was expecting, but I enjoyed them nonetheless, so I took a brief detour and ended up reading all the other stories in my copy of Ashenden, so that was one more book crossed off my list.

This volume is subtitled East and West and they're drawn from Maugham's travels, many of them in the South Seas. They were written between 1919 and 1931, during the British colonial period, and many of them are set in British colonies and islands, including Malaysia, Singapore, Samoa, and Hawaii, though of course nearly all the characters are white British people. I mostly enjoyed reading the South Sea stories but nearly every one of them had some uncomfortable racist elements -- the natives are described as heathens, there are racial epithets, and most of them don't even have names (house servants are frequently just addressed as "boy." Some of the male characters have native wives and children who are just tossed aside like yesterday's newspaper. There's also some misogyny, and some anti-Semitism in the Western stories set in Europe. There's one story called "The Alien Corn" which is particularly anti-Semitic; another "The Vessel of Wrath" has some misogyny which left me aghast.

It's really hard to read the racism and sexism in classic books -- I love classics, but where do you draw the line? Should you stop reading a favorite author because of attitudes which were considered acceptable at the time in which they were written? How do you reconcile loving an author's work if it has racist elements? I really love books written in the first half of the 20th century, but the racism makes me really uncomfortable and some authors are so sexist I can hardly read them any more. I suppose that's why I've been focusing more on women authors. 

I still own the second volume of Maugham's stories, The World Over. It's a much shorter volume, only 681 pages, but those stories are much shorter and there are a lot more of them. I'll probably read the rest of them this summer but I think I'm going to tackle another (woman) author's short stories first.