Chéri and The End of Chéri
- Author Colette
- Narrator Gabrielle de Cuir
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Run Time 11 hours and 20 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Classic fiction.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
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What to expect
An exquisite new translation of Colette’s tragicomic masterpiece, a pair of novels exploring the relationship between an aging courtesan and a much younger man
Chéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri, mark Colette’s finest achievements in their brilliant, subtle, and frank investigations of love and power.
Set in the Parisian demimonde in the last days of the Belle Époque, Chéri tells the story of Léa, a courtesan at the end of a successful career, and her lover, the beautiful but emotionally opaque Chéri. Chéri will soon enter into an arranged marriage, ending their six-year affair, which—they will each realize too late—has been the one real love of their lives. The End of Chéri picks up their story in the aftermath of the First World War; as a psychically wounded Chéri begins an inexorable descent, he finds he cannot return to the Léa he left.
With a preface by the acclaimed Lydia Davis, Rachel Careau’s lean, attentive translation restores to these classic novels their taut, remarkably modern style—the essence of Colette’s genius.
Critics Review
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“This heartbreaking, astute pair of novels…are among the best of her vast impressive canon.”
New York Times Book Review -
“Careau’s meticulous and agile translation of this pair of novels brings to Anglophone readers some of Colette’s finest writing, rich in the sensuality for which she is widely known—but also in the sharpness of her social observations…and she does so in a way that feels at once faithful to the author’s era and utterly timeless.”
New York Times -
“I was left with a new sense of Colette’s self-possession as a writer.”
Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night -
“An admirably accurate new translation…[that] sensitively renders the unique tone and philosophy of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.”
Diana Holmes, author of Colette -
“Capture[s] the bone-on-bone feeling of Colette’s prose…Anglophone readers will finally be able to appreciate why Colette is one of the twentieth century’s major writers.”
Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse -
“In this new translation of Colette’s two most celebrated novels we seem to be reading her in English for the first time—her prose lean, limpid, and knowingly askew.”
Richard Sieburth, professor emeritus of French literature, thought, and culture and comparative literature at New York University
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