Mags, Colette

Since my last post I read an issue of The New Yorker, and stared a new issue of The Economist. I also completed the reading of Andre Malraux. His long meditation on the sacred and the unseen in art certainly was wonderful. I was interested to read that his work had been criticized, too much for its value according to his editors, for getting certain particular facts wrong. I agree, this is a work with a broad sweep, and I don't care if he got one of the dates wrong.

Having at last received the last 11 volumes of the complete works of Colette, I read three more volumes yesterday. These are easy reads, and I was surprised to hear of Colette's affair with her own stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, since I had also read de Jouvenel's work as a futurist. Poor him, his work is valuable, but his obituary will read: "Deflowered by his own stepmother, the flamboyant, sexually omniverous writer Colette..." I hope he doesn't have an alert on his name for blogs... I was interested to read her books of non fiction, about her life with women or her learning to be a writer, but I find her work in fiction so far to be bland, in French anodin. There are still quite a few volumes to go, I plan to finish this off on the week-end holiday at the latest.