Excerpts from "My Mother's House"

1922
Colette, translated by Una Troubridge and Enid McLeod
Excerpts from My Mother's House
B+


This is what Colette does best, character portraits of her family and celebrations of nature.  There are moments when the Claudine series achieves this, but there's too much twisted sexuality and misery.  (And by twisted, I don't mean "bisexual," I mean cruel and dishonest.)  The five excerpts are "Where Are the Children?", "Jealousy," "The Priest on the Wall," "My Mother and Illness," and "The Seamstress."  We see her mother in particular, earthy and wise, vain and loving.  Her father is most visible in "Jealousy," and we see how he isn't aware that he and his wife are getting older.  Colette's three older siblings are glimpsed in varying degrees, although there's a sense, particularly in the first story, of them all, Colette included, hiding and living their lives as private individuals.  Colette's daughter, also called Colette, appears in the last story.  (She was born in 1935 and rarely saw her mother, although you'd never guess it from this tale.)


Like the "country" scenes of Claudine, the place where Colette grew up seems lush, wild, and beautiful, as in the passage on p. 45 that describes grass snakes, purple heather, blackberries, and all the other treasures that Colette and her brothers find.  In the middle story, seven-year-old Colette hears the word "presbytery" and tries to guess what it means.  She decides it's a yellow-and-black-striped snail.  That sense of wonder, mystery, and playfulness still remained in Colette in this work written when she was almost 50.