Chéri - Colette

Colette is an author I've been meaning to read for ages, and I finally got around to reading this book for French Bingo. I really enjoyed it! It's a deceptively simple story but it has a real emotional impact.  I think it's a very "French" story, in that it's about love and pragmatism and the realities of human relationships. For the time in which it was written (1920), it is very frank, although it conforms to some modern norms about romantic relationships. I can see that this book was probably really popular back in its day, and that it would have been considered quite a bit more "scandalous" in the US than in its native land. I like to imagine a young woman with freshly bobbed hair reading this racy new book from France on a beautiful college campus in Fall in New England. Maybe she's even (gasp!) smoking! Ha ha. But joking aside, this was a lovely book and I look forward to reading more from Colette.