A la recherche du temps perdu

Colette's beautiful memoir, My Mother's House and Sido, is an intensely lyrical, sensuous evocation of French provincial life. Basing her recollections of her childhood around the family home and its heart - her mother, she creates a lovingly detailed picture of her early years and the significance of her mother's influence.

"My mother smelled of laundered cretonne, of irons heated on the poplar-wood fire, of lemon verbena leaves which she rolled between her palms or thrust into her pocket. At nightfall I used to imagine that she smelled of newly-watered lettuces, for the refreshing scent of them would follow her footsteps to the rippling sound of the rain from the watering-can, in a glory of spray and tillable dust."

This is a "blue-remembered hills" book, made the more poignant by Colette's turbulent and unhappy adult life. In the introduction, Judith Thurman comments that literature offers writers "an opportunity to recover and repair the 'dropped stitches' [in Colette's words] of a life, and these vignettes show her picking up and making whole that which for her had lain unfinished.

These essays are written with a richness and vibrancy which makes them a compelling portrait of a woman and a time as seen through an artist's eye. It is a passionate, graceful book, acutely realised: pure pleasure.

Comments

[Dark Hearted Cat]

Purr, purr, purr! So glad you liked it!

[Mary Ronan Drew]

What a lovely review of what is clearly a lovely book.

md

[Peg]

Oh, that book sounds lovely, Cornflower I was reminiscing about my Mom yesterday - she would be 100, if she were alive. She was the best mom, cook, knitter, stitcher, sewer and above all she loved me. She always smelled nice too, even though she rarely wore scents.

[Bluestalking Reader]

I'd like to read some Colette. She's been on my list for ages but I never seem to manage to get to her. I think I even have this book somewhere, in a different edition.

[Bluestalking Reader]

I'd like to read some Colette. She's been on my list for ages but I never seem to manage to get to her. I think I even have this book somewhere, in a different edition.