Colette

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette -- the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius" -- will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century.

Colette (1873-1954) was a prolific novelist who celebrated sexual pleasure and invented a language for it at a time when women writers were inhibited about dealing with the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world and the joys and pains of love served as her main themes, and her novels -- Cheri, La Chatte, and Gigi, among them -- blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman.

Colette's writing was inspired by entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siècle gay aesthetes. She admired those who lived on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters -- she published in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. In a multifaceted approach, Kristeva considers Colette's use of metaphor, the characters in her novels, and the development of her writing within the context of her life. Paying particular attention to the language the French writer used to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable," Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing.

Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation. The impression that remains is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures -- its jouissance -- in a melding with the world's flesh.

Columbia University Press

The third book in Kristeva's trilogy on female genius, Colette interlaces commentary on the life and work of this notorious French novelist who made it possible for women to write erotic literature. The result is an elegant and sophisticated critique filled with psychoanalytic insight.

Library Journal

French writer Colette's last word was "look." Perhaps it should have been "devour," for she lived voluptuously. Colette did not want simply a glimpse of life but a firm grasp of it. She was married three times, participated in an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and wrote for World War II Vichy journals while trying to prevent her third husband (a Jew) from being deported. This scholarly biography, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Colette's death, is not a scandal sheet but a psychoanalysis of Colette in which Kristeva (linguistics, Univ. of Paris VII) uses psycholinguistics to explore the author's work and life. Together with Kristeva's previous biographies of Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein, it forms the "Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words" trilogy. Like the other two, this book offers writing too dense for lay readers and will appeal only to scholars, who will benefit from Kristeva's insights into Colette's work. Recommended for academic libraries.-Bob Ivey, Univ. of Memphis Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII. A world-renowned psychoanalyst and literary theorist, she is the author of many books, including Hannah Arendtand Melanie Klein (both published by Columbia).

Jane Marie Todd is a translator living in Portland, Oregon. She has published some thirty translations, including Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva's The Feminine and the Sacred (Columbia).