Colette's last hit, Tanizaki's puppets, McBain's police work - the wash of blue and white which was the sky

 

Some of these books have to got back to the library.  Let’s write ‘em up.

***

Some Prefer Nettles (1929) by Tanziaki Junichiro.  A married couple has fallen out of loe with each other, and the wife in love with someone else.  They should divorce, probably, but then what’s the hurry.  Every literature has, at some point, its divorce novels, and here is a Japanese example.  It is mostly from the point of view of the shallow Westernized husband, whose Westernization is described in two fine scenes, one where he buys a multi-volume Richard Burton Arabian Nights in order to read the dirty parts (which he never finds), and another where he visits his Western “mistress,” who is a Russian-Korean prostitute working in a brothel.  Some readers may wish the story had a different point of view character, but I had a good laugh at him.

My puzzle was how this tight but flatly-written domestic novel is a candidate for “greatest novel by greatest Japanese writer.”  Let’s see what Donald Keene says in the “Fiction” volume of Dawn to the West (1984):

Some critics consider this to be Tanizaki’s finest work, not only because of its intrinsic literary excellence  but because it presents both subtly and effectively the great transformation in Tanizaki’s life from a worshiper of the West to a believer in the Japanese heritage.  (759)

The intrinsic excellence is unspecified, and the last part is not remotely an aesthetic quality.  So I am still puzzled.  The Japanese cultural detail, including several substantial sections about the puppet theater, is of high interest, the ironies of the marriage are well-observed, etc. etc.  But “finest” and so on, I don’t see it.

***

Cop Hater, Ed McBain (1956).  I am continuing my education in the history of crime fiction with a key police procedural, the first of a long line of 87th Precinct novels that abandon any hint of a puzzle mystery for the grind of ordinary, tedious police work.  Or at least make steps in that direction.  My sense of the realism of Cop Hater is based entirely on subsequent cop shows deeply influenced by these novels, so what do I know.

Salvatore Lombino was a classic hack writing science fiction under these pseudonyms and crime fiction under those, more or less settling for the McBain name when these books became his biggest hits.  In classic hack fashion, his prose can get kinda purple, when I would expect nothing but plainness:

The clear silhouettes of the buildings slashed at the sky, devouring the blue; flat planes and long planes, rough rectangles and needle sharp spires, minarets and peaks, pattern upon pattern laid in geometric unity against the wash of blue and white which was the sky.  (1)

A little purple is all right with me.  I enjoyed this book, and if I were a real fan of mysteries I would seek out more, but really I would rather know what else was out there.

***

Gigi (1945) by Colette.  Age 71, writing in occupied Paris, Colette writes the biggest hit of her life, a novella about a fifteen year-old girl being groomed to be a courtesan by her grandmother and great-aunt, both courtesans themselves.  The story is not as creepy as it sounds only because it is not clear what is going on for quite a while.  Maybe the grandmother is just unusually obsessed with etiquette, or something.  And the real story of the story is Gigi’s subtle resistance, ultimately successful, to her groomers.  The character in the 1958 Vincente Minelli musical is surely aged quite a bit?

The book titled Gigi includes the novella and three other pieces.  “The Sick Child” is the saddest thing, a lovely piece about the imaginative life of a boy bedridden with polio.  “The Photographer’s Wife” oddly has more detail about the lost profession of pearl stringing – “Because I had, in the old days, a pearl necklace like everyone else” (2nd paragraph) – but the title character takes over by the end.  “Flora and Pomona” is not a story but an extended wander through Colette’s love of flowers, plants, and even, why not, fruit.  Colette mostly writes at my reading level, but with that last one she kicked me around pretty hard.  The flowers, the parts of flowers, just to begin.  Good for my French, I tell myself.

“Gigi” is easy to find in English.  The next two stories are in the big Collected Stories, although all translation above is mine.  “Flora and Pomona” is in a 1986 collection of Colette’s essays titled Flowers and Fruit.  All a pleasure to read, setting aside the difficulty of the French.

  

My last two Colette books - hotels and apartments - What remains to be said about a passionate love affair?

Just two Colette books left.  Lots written, a book a year as usual, in the 1930s and 1940s, but I have only read a couple of them.

Bella-Vista (1937).  Just as I say that Colette writes thematically, conscious of the book, even when it is a collection of short pieces, here we have a book that looks like a miscellany.  One story looks back to the music hall days, another is a little melodrama about young couples on vacation, and a third is about the sexual misadventures of Colette’s half-brother, a piece that would fit in La Maison de Caludine – Sido is keeping track of her unacknowledged grandchildren.  And the fourth piece is one of Colette’s many Saint-Tropez stories, although I have not read any of the earlier ones.

Perhaps that is the theme, a collection of previous themes, perhaps with a little more sex in them.

The title story has a famous opening:

It is absurd to suppose that periods empty of love are blank pages in a woman’s life.  The truth is just the reverse.  What remains to be said about a passionate love affair? It can be told in three lines.  He loved me, I loved Him.  His presence obliterated all other presences.  We were happy.  Then He stopped loving me and I suffered. (tr. Antonia White)

I don’t know what story this suggests to you, but the He in this case turns out to be the title pension, not quite seaside, where Colette and her personable dog stay during the off-season because she is renovating her new house.  Or not, since a running joke is that whenever she drops by the workman are playing boules, grilling sausages, and drinking rosé – “’they offered me a glass.’”  Colette falls in love with Bella-Vista, where she eats well even if she gets no writing done, then things take a turn and she falls out of love.

I do not want to say much about it, but “Bella-Vista” includes a transsexual theme that might make the story of interest to people interested in such things.  Which I doubt.  Who, among the devotees of the new, wants to read this old stuff?

If I ever go to Saint-Tropez, I will eat at Colette's namesake restaurant, next to her house.

Three… Six… Nine… (1944).  Nine different apartments in Paris over the course of a life, culminating in the final, permanent one, where a decade later Colette would die.  Charming, light, and suspiciously missing something.  The war, the Nazi occupation, that is what is missing, although the book is presumably some kind of celebration of the liberation of Paris – it was published in December, 1944.  The last page, a description of the nearby Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, by a writer not normally particularly religious, is surely an oblique gesture in this direction.

The book is probably best read by someone who knows Paris at least a bit.  It sure made me want to go back, but what does not do that?

The first edition featured a number of illustrations by André Dignimont.  I used one of them, Colette at her writing desk in the last apartment, for the first post in this series; the one above is also from this book.

I am sure I will read more Colette soon enough.  For example, the famous Gigi, which appears the next year (1944).  Colette’s most famous works appeared in 1900, 1920, and 1944 – how many writers have a record like that?  Please let me know which Colette books you have especially enjoyed.

Five more Colette books, including La Maison de Claudine - My mother smelled of lemon-verbena leaves which she rolled between her palms or thrust into her pocket

Colette wrote close to a book a year for fifty years.  It’s a lot of books.  I’m still in the early 1920s, the time of the novels Chéri and Le Blé en herbe.  I have mostly read Colette’s short pieces, not her novels.  From this period:

La Chambre éclairée (1922, The Well-lit Room), a ragbag of pieces published during the war, some of which are about wartime life in Paris, which sounds to me more interesting than it is.  The Collected Stories only includes one of the these, a few pages about a misogynistic dressmaker.

La Femme cachée (1924, The Hidden Woman).  Whereas almost all of this is in Collected Stories, likely on the grounds that this book is something new for Colette, a book of short stories.  Regular old short stories, largely about couples, often in hotels.  Young couples on a honeymoon, older couples working on their marriage, that sort of thing. 

I hope I have made clear that one interesting thing about Colette is that although she mostly wrote short pieces, and always wrote short books, she thought in terms of the book, the text as a coherent object of some kind.  Animals or the music hall or couples in hotels.  Books that make sense as books.  One more reason it would be nice for English-language readers to be able to engage them as such.  Colette would make more sense.

La Maison de Claudine (1922).  This one is a beauty.  It is a childhood memoir in the form of vignettes, centered around Sido, Colette’s mother, set in village Burgundy, full of animals, flowers, and minor small-town incidents.  Colette links the book to her earliest books, the Claudine novels, but only in the title, The House of Claudine.  The most recent English translation abandons the connection, going (accurately, as far as the contents go) with My Mother’s House. 

She was easily moved to laughter, a youthful, rather shrill laughter that brought tears to her eyes, and which she would afterwords deplore as inconsistent with the dignity of a mother burdened with the care of four children and financial worries.  She would master her paroxysms of mirth, scolding herself severely, “Come, now, come!...” and then fall to laughing again till her pince-nez trembled on her nose.  (“Laughter”, ellipses in original, tr. Una Vincenza Troubridge and Enid McLeod)

Colette gives her mother a big, appealing personality.  And she, Colette, is such a pure sensualist:

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.  (“My Mother and Morals”)

In a few years, Colette would write another little book, Sido (1930), that openly mythologized her mother, turning her into some kind of domestic nature deity.  Her father and siblings, also treated in the book, come off more like people.  An odd book.  My Mother’s House is the easy, maybe the easiest, Colette book to recommend to newcomers, at least those who do not mind a book that is minimally eventful but more about personality and mood.

Now I have just two more Colette books to go, the two I read most recently, but I am now reminded that, no, I have read one more Colette book, sort of, a collège anthology of letters titled Mère et fille (Mother and Daughter), which gives about a third of its length to the formal 17th century Mme de Sévigné, most famous for Proust’s use of her; a third to George Sand scolding her daughter; and the rest to Sido writing young Colette and Colette writing her own daughter.  Honestly most of what I remember about this book is that George Sand was a nightmarish mother.  Colette and her mother and daughter were all ordinary people, not constantly disappointed geniuses.  The complete collection of the correspondence between Colette and her daughter is over 600 pages long.  I enjoy Colette enough that I sometimes imagine reading “all” of her fifty plus books, but maybe not all of “all.”

Some Colette novels about affairs with younger men - beggars for favours of her kind drink in the illusion of generosity

At some point here Colette begins a long love affair with her 16 year-old stepson – I suppose he does not stay 16 for long – and writes a few short novels about older women with young boyfriends. The most famous is Chéri (1920), where the title character is the most beautiful man in France, an exquisite surface:

He was capering about in front sun-drenched rosy pink curtains – a graceful demon, black against a glowing furnace, but when he pranced back towards the bed, he turned white again from top to toe, in his white silk pyjamas and white Moorish slippers.  (first page of the novel, tr. not mentioned in the British edition I am looking at)

Chéri (in English maybe Dearie) is always feminized, and is at this moment wearing his mistress’s pearls.  She is a high-end courtesan nearing the end of her career, keeping her spirits up with the help of Chéri’s youth. She is a wonderful character, but she gets to think about age and death and the meaning of love, subjects with weight.  It is a testament to Colette’s skill that shallow Chéri functions as a character at all, and is not just some kind of faun or nymph.

Where Chéri is sad but balanced, the sequel, The Last of Chéri (1926), gives itself over completely to Dearie and becomes a work of complete despair, or revenge.  I probably read the Chéri books twenty years ago, and I had remembered the mood of the first one pretty well, but not the inexorable grimness of the second.  Colette was adept at writing plotless stories, but she could turn on the melodrama when she wanted.

Le Blé en herbe (1923, Ripening Seed) is about a pair of teenagers, in love with each other but working on the complicated problem of whether or not they are a couple in an entirely plausible adolescent fashion.  I can think of a few precursors, mostly French, but this book seemed to me like a genuine advance in the fictional representation of adolescent psychology.

The boy in the couple adds a complication by allowing himself to be seduced by a single woman, bored, older (all of thirty) on vacation in the neighborhood.  Let’s look at some sexy Colette prose:

She put her arms on his shoulders, and with a slightly brutal shove she forced his dark head down on her bare arm.  Thus burdened, she hurried towards the narrow confines of the shadowy realm where she, in her pride, could interpret a moan as an avowal of grief, and where beggars for favours of her kind drink in the illusion of generosity. (last page of Ch. XIV, tr. another old edition that doesn’t say!)

The eroticism gets a little abstract there.  The sex is hidden by the chapter break.

Emma at Book Around the Corner has a perceptive review of The Ripening Seed.

It is curious that the point of view of these novels is, as a group, mostly that of the young man.  Colette’s work is always inspired by her own life, but she is not a narcissist, not always the subject of her work.

Colette's music hall, and some more animals - green like a sick leaf, green like a bitter lime

I should try to go faster than one Colette book a day.

Backstage at the Music Hall (1913). 

Colette was a touring actress for a while.  I am amazed by how much writing she did while acting, but a common theme of her writing about the music hall scene is how boring it is.  Many of the sketches in this fascinating little book are about performing as work, as a job, and many others are about her co-workers. 

Hélène is not a real dancer, but a “little piece who dances.” 

She made her music-hall debut last season, in a revue, and as her first attempt, she “flung” at her audience two scabrous little ditties, putting them across at the top of her band-new, unsophisticated, brassy voice, without any of the simperings of false modesty, but with a perfectly straight face, and with an aggressive innocence that enchanted…  She boasts of being a “hard worker,” and sticks to her ungainly, plebeian name.  (“The Hard Worker,” tr. Anne-Marie Callimachi)

I see a lot of vocabulary in that passage that is not among the 1,000 most common words in French.  The translation, and most of the book, can be found in The Collected Stories of Colette (1983, ed. Robert Phelps), a book that perhaps hurts Colette as much as it helps.  The author of charming little thematic collections is crammed into a 600-page monster, the stories incomplete and arranged in a scheme that I have not figured out.  The music hall stories are all together, at least.

Someone should publish new editions which are just the original books with the original illustrations in the original order.  That is all I ever want.  Use the original typeface and page layout while you are at it, please.

The earlier novel The Vagabond (1910) is based on the music hall experiences, too, but I have not read it.

La Paix chez les bêtes (1916) – The Peace at the Home of the Beasts.  What was in this one?  Lots of animals, cats and dogs and more.  For two pages, Colette describes butterflies (“The Butterflies”):

The “citric” butterfly turns there, green like a sick leaf, green like a bitter lime, it flies away if I move, watching the least movement of my hands. The red sylvan creatures, the color of the dirt, rise up in a cloud before my steps, and their tawny lunules seem to spy on me.

My translation, I guarantee a bad one because I do not understand everything I wrote in English, much less in French.  Colette is in her prose poem mode here.  For some reason almost none of the contents of this book are in The Collected Stories.  Are these ever pure Colette.

Do I have room for one more?  The next book I have read is Chéri, which is in a new phase, so no.  Tomorrow, the beautiful young men.

Colette's Tendrils of the Vine - I no longer enjoy a happy sleep, but I no longer fear the tendrils of the vine - with a digression on Philippe Delerm

On with Colette.

The Tendrils of the Vine (1908). 

I borrowed the original cover from Wikipedia.  Colette is at this point, and for a long time to come, calling herself “Colette Willy,” even though she has divorced the odious Willy.  Professional names have their own logic.

This is a collection of short pieces: some stories, some sketches, a couple more dog-cat dialogues.  Even the stories are not so plotty.  The title piece, two pages long, begins with a just-so story, why the nightingale sings at night, so that now:

He sings just to sing, he sings such lovely things that he does not know anymore what they were meant to say.  But I, I can still hear, through the golden notes, the melancholy piping of a flute, the quivering and crystalline trills, the clear and vigorous cries, I can still hear the first innocent and frightened song of the nightingale caught in the tendrils of the vine…

So this fable is about Colette, about her escape into the difficulties of freedom.  “I no longer enjoy a happy sleep, but I no longer fear the tendrils of the vine…” (tr. Herma Briffault, from The Collected Stories of Colette).  Many of the little pieces are about Colette.

The French tradition is more attached to the prose poem, whatever that is, than any other I know, and I often find it useful to think of Colette as an author of prose poems, whether they are published as two-page units or as elements of novels or memoirs.  Extractable descriptions of sensory experiences, often visual, are what I find best in Colette.  Charles Dantzig, in the entry on Colette in his Selfish Dictionary of French Literature (2005) writes that “I love better her eye than her belly” (p. 235), meaning her appetites and pleasures, and I agree, but this is a matter of taste, and the more I read her the more I appreciate her sensory exuberance in whatever form it takes.  It puts her a line with Proust, against the anti-rhetorical Cartesians that wrote so much of the French literature of the time, even if that other stuff is easier for the poor schmoe working on his French.  Too many words rather than too few.

Tendrils of the Vine reminded me strongly of the work of Philippe Delerm, a junior high French teacher who had a big best seller with the 1997 The First Swallow of Beer and Other Minuscules Pleasures (La Première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules), a collection of thirty-five one- or two-page pieces about positive sensory experiences.  Note that the title piece is not about the pleasure of beer, but of the first swallow, the immediate anticipation, taste, and muscle action.  Two pages on that is a lot of words.  My other favorite, that I remember clearly, is about the pleasure of the banana split, not so much about eating it, but about the irresponsibility of ordering it in the first place, and watching it being brought to the table.  Delerm has made a career out of these little things – the other book of his I have read is It’s Always Good (C'est toujours bien, 1998), the same concept but directed at 10-year-olds (my reading level at the time was that of a 10-year-old), the pleasure of the evening of the last day of summer vacation, like that.  I guess we have this kind of thing in English, but much less of it.

Tendrils of the Vine is for some reason the representative Colette book on a curious and fascinating “100 Books of the Century” poll created by the newspaper Le Monde in 1999.  Now that I have read a dozen or more Colette books, it seems like an arbitrary choice, but perhaps I would feel that way about many of them.

I thought I was going to get to the music hall book today, but I guess not.

Beginning a run through some Colette books - "I will dance nude or dressed, for the sole pleasure of dancing"

Since the Zola novel was dragging on so long, I thought, why not mix in a French book that is light and elegant and short and easy?  Some Colette, for example?  Light, elegant, short, but honestly just as difficult as the Zola, with lots of slang, regionalisms, and advanced vocabulary.  But shorter, I remembered that part correctly.

A few years ago there was a craze for autofiction, mostly British as I remember, both the craze and the books.  I read a number of professional reviews of who knows which books which made a number of claims about the innovations of the current books, all of which, every time, made me think “Have you not read Colette?  She was doing that a hundred years ago.”  More people should read Colette. 

My impression is that those who do read Colette agree with me, whether they prefer her or her sentences.  She wrote memoiristic fiction and fictionalized memoir, so her personality is everywhere in her work.  I am more interested in her insight into animals, including the human type, and her poetry, those surprising words that make her more difficult than she first seems.  But she makes a good imaginary friend, the kind who might be hard to take in large doses but is wonderful to meet once in a while.  She does all the talking.  She has been doing such interesting things.  Her actual life was preposterously eventful.

I’ve read quite a lot of Colette since I started studying French seriously, and thought it would be a good idea to write some kind of overview.  This and subsequent posts are the shallow version of that idea.  Let me load up Colette’s French Wikipedia entry.

The Claudine books come first, Claudine at School (1900) and three more.  I have not read these.  They were published under the name of Willy, Colette’s odious but seductive husband, the greatest hack of turn-of-the-century French literature.  They somehow seem compromised to me, and their subject is certainly soapy stuff, a roman fleuve of marriages and affairs and so on.  Or so I understand.  They’re likely better than I think.

Retreat from Love (1907), now this I have read a couple of times in English.  It is the last Claudine novel, and Colette’s declaration of independence from Willy, dumped and divorced, her reclamation of the characters.  The book is quite close to plotless and full of the kind of thing I call “lovely” writing, especially all of the extraordinary descriptions of animals.  I wrote a piece about Retreat from Love four years ago, and wrote a bit about its animals long before that.  I apparently had more to say about Colette before I had read many of her books than I do now.

Seven Dialogues of the Beasts (1904, Barks and Purrs in an old translation), expanded to Twelve Dialogues and arranged in other ways.  The stories are literally dialogues between Colette’s Chartreux cat Kiki and brindle bulldog Toby.  The animals weather a storm, meet a puppy, meet a turtle, and cope with a late dinner.  Toby is a bundle of anxiety; Kiki is an ironist. 

The dialogues are as charming, or twee, as they sound.  I read them in a school edition, collège (junior high) level – what lucky students to have this book forced on them – visible here.  What I loved about the edition – about French literary education generally – is that it has an entire section on the literary tradition of talking animals {“Words of the beasts” / “Paroles de bêtes”), with texts from Aesop and Perrault and so on.  Then it has another section about dialogue as a stylistic device.  The French teach literature by surrounding it with more literature.

One of the dialogues, “Toby-dog Speaks,” from a bit later (1908), post-Willy, turns out to be a key Colette text.  Anxious Toby reports to Kiki a monologue Colette directed at him.  The story is really a Colettian manifesto for a new life, written in the form of a dialogue between a cat and a dog.

“You hear me,” She cried, “you hear me, brindled toad, big-hearted little bull! I will not go to the premieres any more – except on the other side of the ramp.  Because I will yet dance in the scene, I will dance nude or dressed, for the sole pleasure of dancing, adapting my gestures to the rhythm of the music, turning, burned by the light, blinded like a fly in a sunbeam… I will dance, I will invent beautiful slow dances where the veil sometimes covers me, sometimes envelops me like a spiral of smoke, and sometimes stretches behind me like the sail of a ship…  I will be the statue, the living vase, the leaping beast, the balanced tree, the drunken slave…”  (translation, such as it is, mine; all ellipses in original)

And that is just what Colette did, or was doing.  Is this ever autofiction.  The dog-cat dialogue turns out to be a flexible form.

Tomorrow, Colette in the music hall.

it’s so pleasurable to imagine that it makes me clench my teeth slightly - Colette's Retreat from Love

Here I see the Obooki put Colette on his list of “Favourite 53 Novels.”  His specific choice is “Something… it really doesn’t matter what.”  I would like more opinions on this subject, not because I think the Obooki is wrong – the opinion seems plausible – but because I can’t read Colette’s books all at once and would like some pointers.  Not there is anything wrong with “whatever is at hand.”

What was at hand last month was Retreat from Love (1907), a lovely novel that I had read previously.  The novel has an odd history.  It’s Colette’s first book after freeing herself from her odious husband Willy, who forced his brilliant wife to churn out books in his smut factory, or something like that.  Retreat from Love is the fifth book in the Claudine series, but the first that is written without the shadow of Willy, and also the only one that I have read.

You might think that it would be helpful to know the histories of the characters and so on.  Maybe!  In Margaret Crosland’s translation, some endnotes catch me up, although I am not sure any are needed.  Claudine is living in the countryside in Jura with a friend, Annie, who “has become a despairing nymphomaniac” (3, translator’s introduction).  Claudine’s much older husband is ill and in a sanitarium.  Her stepson Marcel, almost her age, and a flaming homosexual, drops in to escape some trouble in Paris.  Marcel and Annie are both in the thrall of “young bodies,” while Claudine is devoted to an absent old one.  Mild complications ensue.

Claudine thinks about the sex life of her friend, misses her husband, gathers flowers and pine cones, and watches the animals, all of the novel’s magnificent animals:

As light as an elf, a little squirrel flies along in front of us from branch to branch.  Its russet tail fans out like smoke, its fleecy front moving up and down as he leaps along.  He’s plumper, better upholstered and richer than an angora rabbit and leans down to look at me, his forelegs wide apart, his fingernails holding on in human fashion.  His beautiful black eyes quiver with a timid effrontery, and I yearn to catch hold of him, to feel his tiny little body beneath the soft fleece; it’s so pleasurable to imagine that it makes me clench my teeth slightly.  (152)

The sensual theme of the novel is tied to the animal theme.  “A crazy bee flew by, passing so close to her mouth that she drew back and wiped her lips with the back of her hand” (205).  The people are animals, the animals, “the circle of my animal friends,” people:

all those I can’t see in the dusk, but whose mysterious footsteps I can hear: the tap-tap of the hedgehog who trots adventurously from cabbage to rose, from rose to basket of peelings – a light sound on the gravel, the sound of someone dragging a leg: it’s the slow walk f the very old toad who lives beneath the stones of the fallen wall.  Toby’s afraid of him, but Péronelle is not beneath giving a timid scratch to his grainy back with the tip if one teasing paw.  (218)

The next few lines move to a hawk moth, “transparent and quivering so violently that he seems to be his own shadow.”  The toad, eighteen months younger, can be seen in a quotation I used eight years ago.  Péronelle is back there, too.  Toby is a bull terrier who practically steals the show.

Maybe I should rephrase my request.  Which Colette books have the most animals?  I love those animals.

A toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls - Colette's animals

"A little later comes a hedgehog, a muddle-headed, scatter-brained creature, bold yet easily frightened, who scuttles along in a nearsighted way, goes into the wrong hole, eats greedily, is frightened of the car and makes a noise like a young pig on the loose. The gray cat hates him, but hardly ever goes near him, and her green eyes grow bitter when she looks at him." (23)

That hedgehog and cat live in Colette's Retreat from Love (1907), where we also find a toad, a bat, a dog, a crab, and probably other critters that I have forgotten. I read this novel fifteen years ago, I would guess, and I had to remind myself what it was about - a bunch of crisscrossing love affairs, lovely but diaphanous, hard to remember.

But I remembered that hedgehog, and the bitter cat. And the toad, definitely the toad:

"under the five loose stone steps a toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls. At dusk he drives away the last midges, the little grubs which live in the cracked stones. From time to time he looks at me deferentially, but with reassurance, then - leaning one hand against the wall in human fashion he stands up to swallow - I hear the nop sound of his wide mouth. When he rests he moves his eyelids in such a pensive and lofty way that I haven't yet dared say a word to him." (22-3)

I found it interesting that Chingiz Aitmatov had been a veterinarian, which certainly informed his writing about animals. Aitmatov reminded me of Colette, oddly. I mean, her world of Parisian courtesans seems pretty far removed from the Kazakhstani steppes. Who knows why she wrote about animals so much, and so well? She, like Aitmatov, observed their world carefully, and made it part of her book. Few novelists do that.

Or am I wrong? Juvenile novels are menageries, right, definitely. I remember reading all sorts of animal stories - raccoons as pets, bears as pets, dogs and more dogs. I don't remember too well if any of them were that well written. I'll think some more. I had not really planned to write about this; maybe it won't go anywhere.

Suggestions, though, are most welcome - who, novelist or otherwise, was good at writing about animals?

Quotations from the Margaret Crosland translation, the only English version, I think.