A clearly autobiographical novel of a schoolgirl growing up in a small town in France and her delightful, often transgressive adventures.
Colette’s schoolgirl voice is charmingly honest and vital, revealing what we all know but might forget about childhood—the kids know and feel a lot more than we adults think. I was inspired to go on and read another five of her novels, and that same vitality of voice is carried through them all.
It is also a wonder how the author is able to deal with erotic material (from both a child’s and an adult’s view) in an insinuating but effective way that would not run her into trouble with the censors, or send her into the underground of French pornography.
The Claudine novels also resulted in a fine Amazon Prime-streaming movie (Colette) about her life and the unscrupulous way her husband Willy used her skill for his own self-promotion, taking in large part credit for the early best-selling Claudine novels.
THE STORIES THAT INSPIRED THE FILM COLETTE, out Jan 2019.
The first book in Colette's enchanting Claudine series.
Colette's enchanting stories of the clever and charming Claudine were first published under her husband's name, and they were an instant sensation in early twentieth-century France. In Claudine at School we meet Claudine as a teenager, wickedly witty, rebellious and effervescent, competing with her new headmistress for the affections of the pretty mistress Miss Aimee. With her first book Colette turned her life into art and a literary icon was born.
This book won the University of Notre Dame Fiction Prize in 2004.
What I liked about this, to my mind, increasingly autobiographical collection of short stories is Vivante’s voice. His writing is as authentic and straightforward as you’ll find in any literary fiction—no gimmicks, no self-regarding cleverness, just a plainspoken realist who touches a nerve, or two, in every story.
Set in Italy, Canada, and the United States, you get geographical as well as thematic diversity, but as far as I can tell, much is focused on the ups and downs of his own professional and family life. I found the clean prose a breath of fresh air.
Solitude and Other Stories represents Arturo Vivante's quest to use writing to uncover hidden truths. These twenty-four short stories-set in Italy, New England, and Canada-explore various themes, including, as the title story says, solitude. Vivante begins the narrative with a self-oblivious solitude that will become loneliness. Day after day, night after night, Vivante's narrator becomes aware of his isolation, and he decides to seek the company of others. Companionship, therefore, becomes another theme developed in these stories.
Although not explicitly autobiographical, many of these stories do have an autobiographical tone. Vivante writes about things that may have happened in his…
This novel is the first in Ferrante’s autobiographically based Neapolitan tetralogy of growing up and making a life in Italy—friendships, teenage years in school and her poor neighborhood, adolescent experiments with sex, difficult but loving friendships, the rough and tumble of her native city, Naples, and its inhabitants.
I had hesitated to begin because of all the different families and characters who come and go, but a dramatis personae at the front of the novel helps, and as I got into the first chapters of the novel, I found it didn’t matter about the clusters of characters.
The energy of the writing and the “confessional” narrative sweep you along. The honesty and vitality of the prose (beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein) reminded me of Colette’s writing too.
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Now in B-format Paperback
From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but…
The second novel in a historical tetralogy, the book is set in 18th-century Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and environs during the French and Indian Wars. Rebecca from childhood is an artist whose paintings increasingly disrupt the complacency and status quo of her community, a Church of England port city whose economic survival depends on international trade and community solidarity. I see her as a sort of female William Blake. Her “distraction” is her own increasing personality crisis as she navigates the tempestuous waters aroused by her visionary art and her need to survive by being accepted in her community and adopted family. The novel won the Langum Prize for historical fiction in 2003. Amazon carries print editions, but an eBook version is now available from Brandeis University Press.
