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A review by sadie_slater
Cheri and the Last of Cheri by Colette
I'd never read any of Colette's novels, and after seeing the Keira Knightley biopic recently I thought I should rectify that and borrowed a friend's one-volume edition of Chéri and The Last of Chéri.
I was surprised how short each one was; both together come to just under 300 pages, so they're really novellas rather than full-length novels. Chéri, first published in 1920, is set in 1912 and tells the story of the relationship between a young man (the eponymous Chéri) and the ageing courtesan Léa de Lonval; The Last of Chéri is set in 1919, and deals with Chéri's struggles to adapt to life in a changed post-war world.
I have to confess that I wasn't particularly enamoured of these. That may have been partly the translation, which rendered the two novellas into sometimes beautiful but very florid and occasionally slightly cloying prose, but it was more that I really struggled to understand the characters' motivations and feelings, and to care much about what happened to them. I don't know whether this was due to the 1950s translation being overly coy about sex, or to the elliptical nature of Colette's original narrative, or if I was running up against the same problem I have found when I've tried to read romance in the past, which is just that what's being described is so far from anything I've ever experienced that I find it utterly incomprehensible on an emotional level. Chéri himself is also not a particularly sympathetic character; he came across as a petulant man-child who seemed to expect that everything would be done for him by someone else, and his melancholy felt more like a spoiled child's tantrums than real emotion. I did like the coterie of bickering middle-aged courtesans among whom Chéri has been brought up, particularly in The Last of Chéri when the war seems to have lent all the women more power and self-determination (one of the many things that Chéri seems unable to deal with), and at one point I wondered if it was meant to be a gender-flip with Chéri as a male version of the ingénue surrounded by powerful men, but really, it was a slog to finish this and I'm still not actually sure I managed to understand it at all. (I'm not giving this a star rating, because I think my reaction probably has very little to do with the book's actual literary merit.)
I was surprised how short each one was; both together come to just under 300 pages, so they're really novellas rather than full-length novels. Chéri, first published in 1920, is set in 1912 and tells the story of the relationship between a young man (the eponymous Chéri) and the ageing courtesan Léa de Lonval; The Last of Chéri is set in 1919, and deals with Chéri's struggles to adapt to life in a changed post-war world.
I have to confess that I wasn't particularly enamoured of these. That may have been partly the translation, which rendered the two novellas into sometimes beautiful but very florid and occasionally slightly cloying prose, but it was more that I really struggled to understand the characters' motivations and feelings, and to care much about what happened to them. I don't know whether this was due to the 1950s translation being overly coy about sex, or to the elliptical nature of Colette's original narrative, or if I was running up against the same problem I have found when I've tried to read romance in the past, which is just that what's being described is so far from anything I've ever experienced that I find it utterly incomprehensible on an emotional level. Chéri himself is also not a particularly sympathetic character; he came across as a petulant man-child who seemed to expect that everything would be done for him by someone else, and his melancholy felt more like a spoiled child's tantrums than real emotion. I did like the coterie of bickering middle-aged courtesans among whom Chéri has been brought up, particularly in The Last of Chéri when the war seems to have lent all the women more power and self-determination (one of the many things that Chéri seems unable to deal with), and at one point I wondered if it was meant to be a gender-flip with Chéri as a male version of the ingénue surrounded by powerful men, but really, it was a slog to finish this and I'm still not actually sure I managed to understand it at all. (I'm not giving this a star rating, because I think my reaction probably has very little to do with the book's actual literary merit.)